Play With Fire
by Enigmas
Summary: Following the tension created by the Lighthouse operation Russia initiates peace talks aimed at reducing the nuclear weapons owned by the world's major powers. One member of the team must determine where their loyalties lie and how far they are willing to go in the name of Queen and Country when someone from their past surfaces claiming to have knowledge of an assassination attempt
1. Perspective

A/N: Part 2 in series beginning with 'Lighthouse'

**Chapter 1**

Perspective

We can never know what another human being is thinking. We can make educated guesses based on body language what and how they say things but we can never _know_.

This is one of the greatest attractions between members of the human race. It draws us to others, mystery and intrigue, the desire for knowledge. Knowledge about one, completely unique individual. We want to know that person.

Intimacy is not just about physical, or even emotional closeness. It is about psychological closeness. We want to be inside that person's head, more than we want to be inside their bed. We want them to give us 'access all areas' passes to their minds to allow us to explore every inch of them. We want them to want to tell us everything. We in turn, want to be able to judge them fully and completely, not based on what they willingly reveal to everyone else based on their deepest darkest fears and flaws, all of the things that they are less sure of the insecurities that plague them every day but that they feel they cannot share with anyone else, these we must peel away as we grow closer to reveal the truth below and so, to reveal them.

The eyes are known as the windows to the soul and while this may seem very romantic and poetic and while it may even be true, it is still not particularly helpful.

Our soul or our spirit is just that, it is our essence, a canvas on which we add colour but it is not the colour itself, it is not us, it is not who we are.

Who we are is never fixed, ever changing, altered and defined by our experiences and what we choose to do with them. Who we are is what we know, why we hate and love, what we will fight for and what we will die for how and who we respond to every day. The things that we will only ever experience once whether we wish them to repeat everday or we wouldn't wish them on our worst enemy. All of these things, and more, make up who we are, _that _is what makes us unique for no-one can ever have the same experiences as us, and even if they did, they would never react to them in the same way.

This depth and ever-changing complexity cannot be contained within something that is so easily accessible, surely.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul then the soul cannot be who we are. You could never board a train, look at the man sitting opposite you, look into his eyes, into his very sold and then claim to know who he was.

If we could we would all live in a much safer world. We would know when our partner was going to beat on us without ever even going to dinner with them. We would know when we were being lied to, we would never be hurt or manipulated again. We would be able to tell when the man seated at the table, eating and drinking with us, intends to slit our throats to prevent the evolution of something he does not believe in...

What a dull world we would live in. Of course, none of the things that we consider to be evil would be allowed to happen, no-one would rape or murder, and no-one would go to war...But would that then be a world that we wanted to live in? There would be no nothing. The only reason we can have peace is because we know we are not at war. The only reason we do not constantly live in agony is because we know what agony feels like in the first place. We can only be happy if we are not sad, we can only love if we know how to hate, can only live if we know we must die...As human beings, whom, by their very nature, crave knowledge and intrigue, we would be deadened by the fact that nothing interesting would ever happen. If everyone knew everyone else, then we would all do our best to forget, for then, and only then, we would be in a world where we wanted to live...

The exception to this rule is, of course, when some idiotic bastard decides to place himself in the middle of some vital world-saving summit, then I would very much like to be able to look into his eyes and feeling instantaneously justified in putting a bullet between them.

A/N: I wasn't quite sure how to start this without giving everything away in the opening few paragraphs so I settled for this instead...I'm not quite sure why...Anyway, I promise that this will develop into a proper episode and that this waffle will tie into the plotline. In the meantime, think of it as a voiceover and tell me what you all thought :)


	2. Pluntonium Tea Parties

**Chapter 2**

Plutonium Tea Parties

The team was gathered around the large, highly polished, rectangular wooden table in the briefing room waiting for Harry to join them.

It had been around a week since Amelin's suicide and the apparent collapse of the Lighthouse network. It had been a quiet week. The only thing of any note had been the localised threat of a bombing that had turned out to be an over-enthusiastic, chemistry-obsessed teenager; a slow week by their standards, something that all of them had, privately, been infinitely grateful for.

The door slid open with soft hiss and Harry entered looking grim,

"Good morning to you to Mr. Pearce." Ros smirked, sensing that he was not about to invite them all out to lunch.

"If only it was." He countered

"What's happened?" Ruth asked diplomatically, putting an end to their childish conversation before it got started.

Harry took a deep breath and began to explain as the wall-mounted monitor warmed up, "Following the drama of the Lighthouse operation, Russia has decided to try and make amends,"

""Dear God help us all..." Ros muttered

"What have they done ?" Lucas asked, smirking at Ros.

"They've called for international peace talks in an attempt to limit the number of nuclear weapons owned by various world powers."

A large map was projected onto the screen, highlighting the countries with nuclear capabilities,

"They should probably have thought about that _before _they attempted to spark a potentially apocalyptic Third World War." Sofia muttered darkly.

"What do they get out of this? What's in it for them?" Tariq asked.

"Britain wasn't the only country that suffered from the initial stages of Lighthouse, several others were involved, the only difference being that they don't know the true origin or meaning of the attacks. In short it's caused some serious tensions between nations and there are whisperings of the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, potentially leading to an arms race that Russia would be forced to enter into."

"So Russia wants to try and prevented the arms race and calm the tension its created in one neat little peace talk." Lucas nodded.

"Yes and no." Harry said, "Peace talks? Yes. Neat and little..."

"Not so much?" Tariq enquired,

"No, not least because Britain has been chosen to host them." Harry sighed.

"Hold up, Russia's fished the china from the back of the dusty peace talk but we end up hosting the tea party? How did that happen?" Sofia demanded.

"To be honest I'm not sure who we blame for this." Harry muttered, "I've only just been told, it'll be some political move you can be sure..."

"When _exactly _did the world morph into a chess board?" Ros enquired sarcastically.

"No idea, but don't complain, said chess board employs you." Lucas winked.

"Who are the players in this particular game?" Ruth asked.

"That's where things become more interesting. As you all know in 1968 the NPT was drawn up in a bid to limit and control the use of nuclear weapons. The main five countries that participated in the signing of it were the US, Britain, China, France and Russia. All of these nations have agreed to attend these talks..."

Sensing that Harry was going to become nostalgic about the Cold War once again Sofia broke in, "And this is interesting because the little green men from Mars have decided to..."

Harry scowled at her but obliged, "NO martians, but the Russians have convinced North Korea as well as India and Pakistan to join these talks as well, vital as they have never entered into a treaty that limits their nuclear weapons."

"How did the Russians manage to do that?" Ros asked, incredulously.

"Well the Russians can be very persuasive when they want to...If asking nicely doesn't work their always more than happy to go for a Plan B." Lucas said with a trace of black humour.

"I take it that Israel is still insisting that they've never heard of nuclear weapons while casually kicking the left-over plutonium under the carpet?" Sofia asked.

"Correct, however North Korea, India and Pakistan's attendacnce is enough for us to be concerned with for the moment." Harry told them, "Representatives from each country will be arriving within the week with the talks scheduled to begin on Friday. Despite the fact that most of them will be staying at different hotels, the Home Secretary has decided to host the talks in different buildings across London in an attempt to 'showcase our city's beauty'."

Ruth shook her head and muttered, "Where did they find him?"

"Well it's not entirely clear but we're fairly sure he was found with several unicorns and a talking a talking bunny..." Ros said lightly.

"Whatever the case, he won't be budged." Harry said, returning to business though unable to resist rolling his eyes, "Which makes our jobs about ten times hard than they need to be...Bloody politicians."

"Well we love a challenge." Ros said, delicately, though she agreed.

"How long are the talks scheduled to last?" Tariq asked.

"Between three and five days." Harry informed them,

"Make sure you've got Starbucks on speed dial." Ros said, helpfully.

"Adding to our existing problems is the fact that we have received intelligence about a potential attack during the talks."

"Of course we have..." Lucas muttered, smiling humourlessly,

"From who?" Ruth asked,

"An ex-FSB officer named Artem Salko." Harry began, Sofia's eyes flicked momentarily towards Lucas before returning to her notes but neither of them spoke as Harry continued, "He's not been very specific, all he's given us is what I've told you, he wants to set up a meet."

"Do we trust him?" Ruth asked,

"We don't trust anyone." Lucas smirked, with a half-glance towards Sofia.

"Honestly, we don't know." Harry said, more helpfully, "We've never used him as an asset before, to tell the truth we don't really know much about him...However given the nature of these talks we need to assume the worst. Ruth, do some digging on Salko, discreetly, I want to know more about him before we make contact so I'm afraid you don't have long but do what you can." Ruth nodded and accepted the slim folder that Harry slid across the table to her, Sofia's hand lingered on it a fraction longer than was necessary before passing it on. Understanding that she was being dismissed Ruth stood up and left the room, softly closing the door behind her again.

Harry turned to the others, "The rest of you have the enjoyable task of keeping track of the delegations from seven different nations." He told them in mock cheerfulness, "Tariq I want access to round the clock surveillance from every camera in those hotels, set up a constant live feed to be streamed directly to us. You three, "He said, turning to Ros, Lucas and Sofia, "I want you to subtly book and bug rooms that will be used during these talks."

"I take it our paranoia doesn't allow us to wait until we actually have reason to illegally monitor our guests?" Sofia smirked

"Don't be stupid." Ros grinned,

"I want this done before they arrive and I want to make sure that they don't find our 'illegal monitoring' devices, get creative." Harry told them, ignoring the interruption.

"What about the locations of the talks themselves?" Sofia asked, as they stood up.

"We don't know, the plans are changed daily, if we're doing anything with thos locations it will have to be later on in this process." Harry sighed, "I'll probably want at least one of you inside these talks at all times, but we'll discuss that nearer the time."

They all began to leave but Harry called them back,

"Lucas, Sofia, a moment please?"

Ros left as Lucas and Sofia paused, Lucas was about to close the door again when Ruth stuck her head through it,

"Home Secretary for you Harry." She told him, pointing at the phone in his office.

Harry sighed and said, "Wait here a moment." Before leaving.

Lucas quietly slid the door closed and, after making sure Harry and Ruth were out of earshot turned to Sofia, studying her for a moment he murmured,

"If this is about Salko...I won't lie for you Sofia."

She watched him closely, matching his piercing gaze and refusing to break the eye contact between them she whispered,

"I won't ask you to."

A/N: I hope this is an appropriate place to cut, to be honest I'm feeling a little pressure to match my previous story but nonetheless, thank you all for the reviews! I'd like to know your thoughts on where this is headed as I haven't fully decided myself so having your take on it would be interesting. Hopefully you're enjoying this so far, as ever, let me know :)


	3. Trust and Lies

**Chapter 3**

Trust and Lies

Lucas and Sofia were silently arguing when Harry re-entered the room looking irritated. Sensing the tension between them he opened his mouth to question them about it but Sofia, not wanting to answer diffused the situation first,

"What did the Home Secretary want? Is he planning on using Buckingham Palace to host the talks?"

Understanding that whatever had passed between them would pass no further Harry answered her question as opposed to asking one of his own, "No, but I wouldn't put it past him. The North Koreans are getting jumpy; to use his words these talks need to 'run smoothly without a hitch'."

"So an attack during the talks may be considered as a slight problem I take it?" Sofia said,

"Indeed." Harry muttered, "It is vital that these talks are a success, particularly after the Lighthouse saga, Russia probably feels the same way but we have been given the right to use any means necessary to ensure that these talks succeed. That is why I have asked you both in here."

"What can we do?" Lucas asked, with a glance towards Sofia.

"Do either of you know Artem Salko?" Harry asked, looking for a reaction from both of them.

There it was, direct, specific, he had backed them into a corner, one that neither of them had wanted to go near. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, knowing the weight of her answer,

"I've heard the name, why do you ask?" she said, evasively.

"We need to know more about him. Before we meet him and hear what he has to say I wanted to know more about him. I know that he was used infrequently as an interrogator in Russia, but he was also involved in several operations in the nineties, one of which was the one that sent the two of you to Moscow in the first place. I need to know, if either of you have met him."

They both paused, neither speaking, each trying to guess what was going on in the other's mind. Harry took their silence as a reluctance to discuss their experiences in Russia, "I know this is difficult but any information you have on him could be vital."

"No Harry, I've never met him..." Lucas answered softly.

"Thank-you Lucas, you're sure?"

"Quite sure." He said, firmly.

"Sofia? Do you know why you remember the name?" Harry pressed, gently.

"If it had been...I would remember..." she replied, softly, refusing to meet Lucas' cold stare.

"Very well, thank you both." Harry said, clearly dismissing them.

Lucas and Sofia left together, he deftly caught her arm and steered her into the deserted corridor beyond. Once Harry had exited, heading for his office he smoothly slid back inside, pulling her with him.

He closed the door and studied her without speaking. Finally she lost patience and snapped, "I'm not a mind-reader Lucas. If you-"

You don't have to be a mind-reader to know what I'm thinking Sofia." He hissed roughly, "What the Hell was that?" She shook her head and turned away from him, but he continued speaking preventing her from leaving, "You are willing to risk this entire operation, ruin your career for him? You're willing to lie to-"

"I didn't lie." She snarled, angrily cutting across him.

"You didn't tell the truth; call it whatever you like, the outcome is still the same." He said harshly.

"That's funny I didn't see you jumping in to correct me." She breathed, cruelly, taking a step towards him.

"Don't. You put me in an impossible situation Sofia, just because I'm not willing to lie so you can get, whatever the Hell it is you hope to get out of this, does not mean that I would go against your wishes entirely, I respect you more than that... The choice is yours to make, not mine." He said quietly.

"Choice? None of this is my choice."

"Sofia." He gently took her arm, she knew what he wanted, looking at him she saw concern and confusion in his eyes as well as a trace of anger and something else that she could not quite place, before he said quietly, "_Why _are you doing this?"

"I don't know." She said, without thinking as he voice cracked. The mask-like persona that so often adorned her impassive exterior slipping slightly to reveal something like vulnerability beneath.

"Why should they know?" she hissed, suddenly aggressive as she changed tact, the shutters coming down once more, "I've known most of these people for less than two weeks, none of them have earned the right to know anything about me..."

"It's not about what _rights _they have, it's about trust." He said softly.

"No it's not. You can spend the rest of your life trying to make amends for your 'betrayal', shoving honesty and loyalty down their throats and it won't make any difference, they still won't trust you, not completely. It's impossible for human beings to fully trust another. They can trust you with their life, their secrets; even their soul but they will never trust you unconditionally. Humans are fallible, by over very definition. Our ability to make mistakes, to be flawed, is known by every other member of our race and it goes against every instinct we possess to entirely put our faith in something that we know to be imperfect in the first place. There will always be doubt, and where there is doubt there can never be trust. I refuse to spend my life chasing after something I can never have."

"Sofia...You know this is about more than that, that there is more to it than that. The very definition of trust is that is a vow of faith, you don't expect that person to be perfect, that is not what it means, and I would never say I could give or receive perfect trust from someone, but how far we can trust people is enough for me. This is about more than that, you don't not believe in trust, you don't want it, you can't have it because then you would have to give them your trust. I know why you can't do that..." he told her softly.

"It doesn't matter...Why I won't trust people, or if I don't want them to trust me in return. "She said, turning away from him and breaking the connection between them, "I don't think that telling them my mother's maiden name or my cat's favourite brand of tuna is going to make them trust me any more or less than they do now." She said coldly.

"This is a little more than serious than tuna brands..." he protested quietly as she stood stiffly with her back to him.

"It's the same principle, they don't need to know."

"You know that's not true, how can you-"he began,

"No, no I do not. Nothing about me, nothing that has ever happened to me, nothing that nearly happened to me, nothing that may happen to me or nearly happened to me, will ever matter enough for them to know. They have no right to ask, no right to know...I don't owe them anything and _that _is my choice Lucas." She said, breathing hard and staring at him with something close to hatred.

"How can you say that? You owe them more than this Sofia, you may not owe them irrelevant details about your past and private life but this goes beyond that. This directly affects them, you could be risking their lives to satisfy nothing...They deserve more than that...If one of them pays for your stupidity do you want that on your conscience?"

"I will have nothing on my conscience, I will deal with it...If you're so concerned, why don't you free up your own, you know just as much about this as I do." She snapped.

He refused to answer, but she didn't need him to, one hand clenched tightly around the handle of the door she said quietly, without looking at him, "Don't bullshit me like that again Lucas..."

She walked down the corridor irritated. He knew her better than most people and therefore knew which buttons to press. He had annoyed her because she could see where he was coming from. He cared about these people and the idea that she was putting them in harm's way to calm her paranoia had placed him in an impossible situation.

"You OK?" Ros asked, interrupting her thoughts as she met her halfway down the corridor.

"Fine." She said, shortly, Ros took the hint,

"I've got bugs from Tariq; we're heading to The Asquith on the pretext of vetting their penthouse suites to see if they're worthy of our various delegations."

"Alright, I'll drive." Sofia said, shortly, fishing the keys from Ros' pocket.

"Control freak..." Ros muttered, though she did not protest over much.

"Pot, you're black!" she smirked,

"Where's Lucas?" Ros asked, grinning and changing the subject.

"Lost in deep thought in the briefing room." Sofia told her.

Ros smirked, "I'll find him, you get the car sorted."

"Deal."

...

Lucas was standing alone in the room, wrestling with himself. They were both right, he knew her well enough to know and understand her point of view; if he was honest with himself he had reacted in the same way when confronted with a similar situation. He had not had anyone then to act as his conscience and tell him what he should or should not do. Had he, he would have told them something similar, they had no need to seek intimimate details that even the most open among them would be unwilling to reveal. It was too much to hope that she would. She had been closed _before _Russia and her time there had done nothing to improve her faith in humanity. This was her choice and he would not go over her head and make it for her. His relationship with her was more important to him than that with anyone else, for all her words about trust and its impossibility, she trusted him, and he in turn trusted her. He was confident that she would do what needed to be done when the situation called for it, but by then the damage would be done.

On the other hand, he had to think about the team, she was playing a dangerous game and if it turned out that she could not deal with it, the consequences would reach further than Section D. Exasperated, he finally decided that none of this analyzing made any difference. She was not going to share details of her relationship with Salko to the others and he had already decided not to either.

He was about to leave the room and find something productive to do when the door opened, Ros stuck her head in, "Come on Cinderella, you're pumpkin awaits you outside...Impatiently."

A/N: I'm not really too sure about this to be honest. As someone pointed out I tend to be more plot than character driven but this was always planned to focus more on characterisation, still I'm not sure if the conversation between Lucas and Sofia worked, it felt a little awkward to me but then they're both awkward characters so I don't know if that would be a desired effect :) Any advice on this would be great, thank you all for the reviews so far :)


	4. Know Your Enemy

**Chapter 4**

Know Your Enemy

The journey passed without incident as they pulled up outside the magnificent old building and piled out of the car Sofia said, "Why is it always the psychotic dictators that get to live in luxury?"

"I think the answer to that is contained somewhere within the question." Ros smirked as they walked up the wide stone steps into the reception area.

"Right, so how are we playing this?" Sofia asked as they waited in the queue for the front desk.

"One of us just needs to convince her that we are three of the most important people ever to enter this hotel and that they would kill to have the people that we represent stay here." Ros replied breezily, "It's almost as though the part's been written for you." She told Lucas in mock sweetness.

He shook his head slightly, but smiled all the same as he approached the front desk, "We need to view three of your luxury penthouse suites."

"I'm sorry sir; viewing is done in a brochure." The receptionist informed him in clipped tones, pointedly sliding one across the desk to him.

"I would thank you to take that back and remember who you are talking to." He hissed, contemptuously.

"Who _am _I talking to sir?" she asked, mockingly.

"Very well, if you do not want the President of the Untied States residing in your hotel then there are plenty of other hotels available."

"Excuse me sir, did you say the President?" she asked, flushing darkly.

"Is that what you heard?"

"Yes sir."

"Well then that is what I said...Does one of your managers have better hearing than you?" he asked, dismissively, casting his eye around the room.

"No, no sir, which rooms would you like to see?"

Slipping comms into their ears they headed up the stairs to the top floor and the penthouse suites, keys and instructions were accepted, assistance denied.

"Shall we take a room each?" Ros suggested as they stood outside the rooms.

They each entered an identical room, exquisitely furnished. Plump, velvet armchairs sat around a pristine glass coffee table perched on top of an immaculate thick, snow white fur carpet. Chandeliers encrusted with diamonds set in silver hung from the ceilings. Magnificent four poster beds with crisp white sheets and silk hangings waited invitingly in the large bedrooms with breathtaking views of the city sprawled below.

"I've got half a mind to assassinate the PM if this is the level of luxury 'sleazy psychotic politician' buys you." Sofia muttered to the others, as they began looking for a long-term hiding place for their bugs.

"Noted." Ros smirked as Lucas chuckled in agreement.

"OK, creative..." Lucas muttered, refocusing them on the task at hand.

"Is this place really for the American President or was Lucas just winging it."

"I was winging it." Lucas said at the same time Ros answered, "Yes."

"Really?" Sofia and Lucas asked together.

"And the French. The adjoining rooms are for our American friends, the single for our French buddies across the channel." As she run a hand under the armchairs, finding a hollow spot at last she made a small slit in it and inserted the bug into the small hole.

"So who's sleeping with whom in those delegations?" Sofia asked, as she too glanced around the room. Perching precariously on one of the overstuffed armchairs she slipped the bug into the chandeliers bracket that held it suspended over the room.

Lucas laughed softly, "Oh I'm sure we'll find out before these talks are over...The press will have a field day..." he said. As he examined the large marble fireplace the quaint little carriage clock on the mantelpiece above caught his eye. Removing the back he slipped the bug inside it after noting that it did not have a second hand that could have interfered with their signal.

"Done?" Ros checked quietly as they left.

"Done." The others replied, as they too exited the rooms, meeting in the corridors.

"Since you did such a _wonderful _job earlier Lucas, make sure they get checked into those rooms, I don't need to spend my weekend listening to some sleazy business man cheating on his wife." Ros told him as they walked down the corridor.

As they clambered into the car, Ros' phone rang,

"Harry...Yes we've just finished, hold on I'll put you on speaker."

"Do the bugs all work OK?" Lucas asked,

"Yes, everything's fine there, we'll just have to hope they don't get found now. That's not why I'm calling."

"What's happened?" Ros asked,

"It's interesting to me how you always jump to the worst conclusion." Lucas smirked

"Well that way I'm never disappointed." She replied, "What's happened Harry?"

"Salko's made contact, he wants to meet." Harry informed them curtly. "I need someone to meet him and someone else to gave as back-up, he could be dangerous. Ros? Lucas?"

"Sure, where are we meeting him?" Ros asked, as Lucas nodded.

"The London Eye."

"How original." Ros muttered

"What are we getting from him?" Lucas asked,

"I'm not sure, he just said he wanted to meet and discuss how much farther we were going to take this."

"What is that he's after?" Ros asked,

"Not sure, but apparently it's not money."

"I'll believe that when I see it." Lucas said as Sofia snorted.

"That should be in about two hours. Keep in contact." He told them before hanging up.

"Well, one down, five to go." Ros told Sofia, cheerfully, "Shouldn't take too long."

"Indeed...Why are you two still here?" she asked, airily.

"Well I don't intend on _flying _to the eye. " Ros replied quaintly.

"Well I don't intend on driving you." Sofia said, flatly, "The Savoy's nowhere near the Eye..." When still neither of them moved she said, "Do I look like a taxi?"

"No, but you drive like one..." Lucas muttered.

Her glare in the rear-view mirror was enough to make him get out.

...

Lucas and Ros took an actual taxi and arrived at the Eye with almost an hour to kill.

"Fancy a ride?" Ros asked, eying the enormous structure behind them.

"Never had it down as your thing. "Lucas said, upon checking his watch he added, "Why not?"

It was still relatively early in the middle of the week and they ended up with a compartment to themselves.

"So, what's going on with you and Sofia?" Ros asked bluntly, taking a sip of water.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"I think you know what I mean." She said, flirtatiously. He smiled playfully and she raised an eyebrow saying, "You sleeping with her or what?"

He grinned seductively and said, "If I was, why would you care? Jealous?"

She smirked before adding casually, "Well I wouldn't kick you out of bed..."

It had the desired effect, he choked and she smiled, satisfied before she said, vaguely "She seemed upset earlier..."

"I'm not one to kiss and tell..." he replied.

She took the hint, "Good to know."

They were quiet for a few minutes until Ros changed the subject, "How do you want to play it with Salko?"

"I don't know, we're at a disadvantage here and I'm sure he knows it."

"How do you figure that one out?"

"He seems to know a lot more about us than we know about him." Lucas muttered, gazing out at the view.

"True, but we have Ruth. He won't have an advantage for long."

"No...No we won't." He had not considered. There was bound to be a paper trail that documented Sofia's history with Salko. If there was a record, Ruth would find it.

"Do you want to do this one on one with the other discreetly positioned to intervene if necessary? Less intimidating."

"I take it you want to be the one?"

"Do you have any objections?"

"No, I just didn't think you could take the words 'less intimidating' and put them in a conversation about yourself."

She glared at him, "It's times like this I wonder why I didn't just shoot you when I had the chance."

"Well there's no fun in that."

"Right, we've been on this thing so long I'm getting dizzy, fifteen minutes until Salko's due. Shall we get off?"

"We shall."

Ros and Lucas wired up their comms once more, Ros waited cautiously at the base of the wheel while Lucas perched on a wall, a comfortable distance away.

"Heads up." Lucas said as a tall slim figure approached her. He had dark green eyes, and pale skin peppered with tattoos, mostly hidden under a thick winter coat. Despite being slim, he was well-muscled though he carried himself quietly.

"Enjoying the scenery?" Ros enquired, smoothly.

He studied her for a second before answering, "Indeed. "His voice was deep and rich with a clear accent.

"Shall we?" he asked, indicating the wheel behind them.

"No offence but I'd rather keep both feet on the ground as opposed to suspended in the air in a glass coffin with you, we just met..."

"I see, a little paranoid Miss-?"

"Curtis, Heather...Occupational hazard I'm afraid."

She led them to a small green bench situated in the shadow of a large beech tree.

"You haven't brought any of your friends?" he asked, coldly. His intent green eyes had not stopped searching their surroundings.

"We're alone...Unless you have people following you?"

He smiled grimly, "If anyone was following me, Miss Curtis, I can assure you they would not be friends."

"I see, and you're quite sure?"

"I was careful. We are safe."

"I'm not so sure I believe you Mr. Salko." She said, icily.

"Probably for the same reasons I don't entirely trust you. Of course, there is an easy way to check that...If you're telling the truth then I can do this," he said, as he produced a small handgun and pressed it threateningly in the gap underneath her ribs. "Without your friends descending on me."

"Easy..." Ros muttered, more to Lucas than to Salko, "There's no need for that, I've told you."

"Very well Miss Curtis, I work with you, you work with me."

"Indeed...I've been led to believe that you have information for me." She pressed, delicately,

"I do. The kind that your government would deem invaluable at this point. These talks seem to cause more tension than they solve."

She laughed softly, "You're not wrong there." She muttered bitterly, "What do you have for us?"

He laughed lightly, "Clearly you have been misinformed Miss Curtis, you get nothing for nothing in this life."

"Very well...What do you want Mr. Salko? Money? Protection?"

"No, I have money, and as for protection, I've already told you, I've been careful, had I not we would not be here. What I want is far more specific and far more valuable than money." He said, sinisterly.

"What do you want then?" She asked, coldly.

"To be honest Miss Curtis, I was disappointed you see you...Not to say that I haven't enjoyed your company, but I had been hoping for a different member of your team. I take it you know Sofia Fletcher?"

"How do you know that name?" Ros breathed, taken aback.

"It is not important...Suffice it to say that we're old friends."

"What do you want from her?"

"That is for her eyes only."

"Let me be clear Mr. Salko, you do not have carte blanche here, we will not bend to your every will based on tenuous evidence."

"I'm not asking you to bend to anything, at the moment all I want you to do is give her this." He said removing a small flash-drive from his pocket, "She will know what it means. You should tell her, I will accept nothing more, and nothing less than those terms, and that I have _ensured _that I am the only information with the information you seek."

"I'm not so sure that I believe you have any information of note Mr. Salko." Ros said coldly.

He had stood up to leave but turned at her words, leaning in close he murmured, "You may have ruined the overall network but there are still several individual attacks from Lighthouse that will still server their own ends."

She froze as he walked calmly away from her, calling over his shoulder, "Say hello to Sofia for me won't you?"

As soon as Lucas joined her she hissed, "What the Hell was that? How does he know Sofia?"

"I don't-"

"If you finish that sentence in the way I think you're going to I _will_ put a bullet in you." She whispered, warningly.

"We should head back to The Grid." He said, quietly.

"Lucas." She said, sharply, "What can he want from her?" there was more concern than anger in her mind. She had no idea what that man was capable of, but even after their short meeting, she did not want to even guess.

"I don't know." He said, truthfully, looking at her, and seeing his concern mirrored in her face.

...

"Harry? Lucas and Ros have met Salko; they're on their way back now...They say we have a problem."

"Don't we always?" he sighed.

"I'm afraid I'm not going to ease your discomfort." She said, sitting down opposite him.

"Who did you find?" he asked, not sure if he wanted an answer.

"It wasn't easy, the words 'restricted access' have been permanently imprinted on my retinas, but I did manage to find this." She spread a file on the desk between them, and watched as his face darkened, "What does this mean to us Harry?" she asked, softly.

"It means that Sofia has been lying to me..."

A/N: For the most part, thank-you all for your reviews. I apologise to the majority of guest reviewers but someone seems to have taken it upon themselves to continually post the same criticisms with different wordings which has forced me to temporaarily disable guest reviews. I am always grateful to receive constructive criticism from readers and I take all of your opinions into account, however I don't enjoy having the same viewpoint continually shoved down my throat. Let me know what you all thought of this chapter :)


	5. Daggers and Roses

**Chapter 5**

Daggers and Roses

Lucas and Ros returned to The Grid and were disconcerted to find that the open plan work space of Section D was deserted. Looking at one another in mild concern they made their way to the room Tariq had been using to set up live video feeds. The large screens showed them that some members of the human race _were _still alive as they moved in and out of the hotels but the room itself was empty.

They quietly made their way to Harry's office and were relieved to find Harry and Ruth sitting in it.

"Knocking?" Harry enquired, calmly.

"Sorry, when confronted with a building that looks as though it's been plagued by a zombie apocalypse, I always forget my manners." Ros said, taking a seat beside Ruth at the desk.

"What did you get from Salko?" Harry asked. Ruth glanced towards him but he silenced her with a look, she trusted that he would confront Lucas with his part in Sofia's cover up soon enough.

"We met Salko, a little twitchy but given our insights in Russian prison hospitality, we'll forgive that." Ros said, eyes flicking towards Lucas, "What he actually gave us...Is a little delicate, Harry perhaps." Ros said, casually, looking at Ruth.

"This delicacy concerns?" Harry asked.

Curiously Ros said, "Some, 'internal affairs'." Ros replied, evasively.

"Sofia?" Harry asked, softly.

"How did you-"Ros asked, as Lucas closed his eyes.

"Ruth found a connection between Salko and Sofia." Harry replied, testily.

"What kind of connection?" Ros asked.

Harry frowned at her and turned to Lucas before answering, "I will answer that question when I have it, first however, I need to speak to Sofia, and Lucas." He said pointedly.

Ros looked wordlessly between them before rising and silently heading to the door, Ruth was not as compliant,

"Harry?"

"Alone." He said, firmly, before adding gently, "Please Ruth..."

The two women left, Lucas had retreated as far from the desk as he could without leaving the room.

"I know what you're going to say." He murmured.

"Why Lucas?" he spat.

"It wasn't my choice to make Harry-"

"It was your choice to lie to me Lucas; she didn't put a gun to your head."

"She didn't have to Harry...I told you the truth, I wasn't going to put a gun to her head and force her to do the same thing."

"I trusted you Lucas." Harry said, in disgust.

"I haven't given you any reason not to."

"No? You're an intelligent man Lucas, you know what this could mean for us, yet-"

"Of course, but that doesn't justify me betraying her trust."

"What about my trust Lucas? You had no problem betraying that." Harry said, sharply.

"It's not the same..." he said, quietly, "The only one who stood to lose out with the Lighthouse was me. Nothing gives me the right to sell you other people's secrets Harry."

"No Lucas, the job that you do and the relationship between us entitles me to know that, knowing other people's secrets is what we do for a living. I believed you, I trusted you Lucas, after everything, I gave you back everything that you had thrown away, no questioned asked, you owed me more than this."

"I don't owe you anything..." he said, in a dangerous whisper, "I didn't ask you to trust me; I didn't beg for my life back, I didn't put a gun to your head Harry. I'm sick of you playing games with me because you believe that I owe you; having your trust when it suits you and you thinking that you can take it away and justify it based on what happened with Lighthouse. If you trust me, let's move forward, if not shoot me, send me back to Russia, forget I ever existed, just stop playing games with me Harry. Trust isn't a debt that you can call in when you want something from me."

Harry watched him carefully, "You're right, for that I apologise, I've been out of line these past few weeks but you cannot expect things to go back to the way they were Lucas."

"No, but you can't expect me to go against everything I am in order to make them...You know that, were the circumstances altered and it had been you with the secrets, that I wouldn't have revealed them without your permission. We've shared a lot of secrets over the years Harry and some of them have cost me much more than the trust of my colleagues." He murmured, darkly.

Harry was quiet for a moment before he said, "What were Salko's terms?"

Lucas was slightly fazed by the sudden subject change, but recovered and said, "He said he wanted Sofia to do something for him."

"Really, what, specifically?"

"He left a message for her on this," he said, removing the flash-drive from his pocket, "he said she would understand."

"Well, we're smart people; let's see if we can't understand it." Harry said, taking the flash-drive and loaded it into the computer.

There was only one file saved on the memory stick, labelled with Sofia's initials. It turned out to be a beautiful, hand-drawn black and white image. It meant to Harry nothing but Lucas turned pale and hissed, "Bastard."

The image reflected back at them on the screen was fairly simple, despite the detail that had been put into it, a plain white rose had been pierced in its heart by a thin, cruel dagger, small teardrops of blood wept from the point the dagger emerged from the delicate flower.

"Lucas?" Harry asked, softly.

He took a deep breath before explaining, "I told you, when you first got me back that there is a tattoo culture in Russian prisons. All of the images have a specific meaning, depending on where they are and what they're combined with. For example, churches represent how many years have been served, a sailing ship represents a desire for freedom, _this, _is based on those rules."

"A rose, and a dagger, Sofia and Salko?" he asked.

"Yes, but it's more specific than that. The rose represents innocence and purity, the dagger, in this context means death, murder. Murdering innocence...It means-"

"Rape." Said a cold voice from the doorway finished in hushed tones. "Salko?" she asked, calmly.

Lucas nodded and murmured, "They know." In Russian. S

"I had noticed." She replied, in English, moving further into the room.

"Lucas, would you?" Harry asked, softly, while motioning for her to sit.

"He should stay...If that's alright." She said, quietly.

"Very well..."Harry said as Lucas paused. "You lied to me Sofia."

"Your point being?" she asked coldly, studying him.

He leant back in his chair, surveying her. He had not known what to expect from her, denial, justification, a plea for forgiveness. "You find that acceptable?" he asked, delicately.

"Acceptable or not, I don't find it regrettable." She said quietly, "There are some lines that I won't cross, some boundaries I have to have. I won't compromise who I am because the alternative might piss you off."

"You've got balls if nothing else I'll give you that." Harry said grimly, watching her carefully, the more he thought he knew herm the less he actually did. "For the moment it will have to take a backseat, but this is not finished." He said firmly, the talks were too important to allow something like this to take precedence, "I need to know, everything you know about Artem Salko."

She hesitated, it went against every instinct she possessed to divulge information about her this easily, however she knew she was fighting a lost battle and while she may be stubborn she was not stupidly so, "What do you know already?" she asked, in a soft voice.

"That Salko was responsible for conducting several interrogations during your time in Russia."

"Then you know what he wants you to know, nothing more, nothing less. The first thing you need to understand is that he's careful, he knows how far he can push someone, with a precision with which he can identify and reach a person's physical and mental limits, and then knowing how far beyond those limits he can strain before they snap."

"Why was he chosen to interrogate you in particular? You were the only prisoner he had contact with for months at a time, why?"

She smiled bitterly, "I would use the term 'interrogate' loosely, this is what I meant, you know only what he has deemed absolutely necessary...They didn't pick him to torture me. He picked me to torture."

"Why?" Harry pressed, relentlessly.

She paused, watching him for a reaction, "You don't know?" she said, quietly.

"I wouldn't be asking if-"

"No, I mean you really don't know?"

He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands, shrugging. She watched him intently for a few moments before finally continuing,

"When Lucas and I were originally sent to Russia...It was supposed to be simple, I had barely turned twenty-one, they only really picked me because I could handle a conversation in Russian and they thought I would connect with her." She paused, before taking a deep breath to steady herself and continuing, "They wanted someone on the inside of an extremist Russian group in Moscow. They picked a young twenty year old girl named Nicole, they thought she would fit in, she was young, impressionable and her family had connections to the group. Whoever 'they' are, they were wrong, she was killed a few days before our cover was blown..." she trailed off momentarily before continuing in a voice barely more than a whisper, "He tortured me for weeks, for apparent fun before he told me she was his sister..."

"He used your imprisonment as an excuse for revenge?" Harry asked quietly.

"Yes...The strangest part was, I was sorry that she was dead..."

"What was the meaning of having her inside the group? Were they a threat or were they part of something larger?" Harry asked,

She studied him closely, with a strange emotion reflected in her eyes before saying, "He asked me that as well but I never knew the answer...He didn't believe me, he always swore that he would break me, that he would find the truth...I couldn't give him what I didn't have."

"If you had known, would you have told him?" Harry asked quietly,

Knowing that there was more to the question than what their appeared on the surface and that a simple 'no' was not what he was looking for she considered this for a moment, "Honestly, I don't know, he was very persuasive..."

"Why this, why now?" Harry asked, gesturing at the impaled rose still watching them innocently from the screen.

"I don't know...After I left Russia, he still had no answers...After a while he gave up questioning me...For a while all that he would say is that until he knew anything differently, I would be blamed for his sister's death, I would have to pay the full punishment. He couldn't find a reason so he invented some to justify taking his anger out on me. He was with me until my last breath in Russia, maybe now he has an excuse to punish me more...This is what this is about, he doesn't give a damn about peace talks and politics, and if he just wanted sex he would have hired a hooker...This is about control, and torture, revenge...Everything else is just a cover."

"Do you think he's genuine?" Lucas asked, "He said his information was invaluable, he even referenced Lighthouse, however obliquely, and she said that he had ensured that no-one else had access to his information."

"Oh, he's genuine...At first this was just about revenge, but it's festered away for almost a decade, it's become an obsession, a compulsion...Those words are used too much in today's society to hold any weight but the point is, he's lost control, he's lost control of himself, he's left himself with nothing left to live for. His information is genuine, and the only thing he will accept in return for it, is what he has asked for."

"Why would he ask for that? Why not demand intelligence on his sister?" Lucas pointed out.

"This is no longer just about Nicole Salko, as so often with these things, it often stops becoming about the victim far too quickly...And this became about more than that a long time ago. He told me he would break me, that he would have the truth _from me_...Truth is just closure to him, he doesn't need another human being to blame and destroy, he doesn't want that. Whether or not I tell him the truth about Nicole's death, it doesn't matter, he's been trapped in the details of the big picture for too long and he's been joined in them by the Devil. Either way I lose; either way I surrender my control to him, he has all the strings, I can cut them, but I can never pull them."

"Unless Salko _is _the attack, there must be the option to find out about from someone else on the inside."

"No, he's too careful for that, even if there are people, he'll get to them before we do...This is do or die...Literally." she said, darkly.

"I don't care if he's got information about a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament, he can't ask for _this." _Lucas growled.

Harry said nothing.

"Harry?" Lucas hissed in disbelief.

"You want me to go through with it." Sofia murmured. It was not a question.

"If you were out in the field, and he asked you for the same thing, what would you do?"

"I would make a decision. But I'm not in the field, I'm in your office, and I want to know yours."

Harry said nothing once more. The silence filled the room, consuming everything in it until Sofia broke it once more.

"This is new...Even for you. If this is your idea of a test to see where my loyalties lie, some sort of game-"

"I don't think that the threat posed to people's lives is a game. We kill; we risk being killed on a daily basis for those same lives. It doesn't seem like a huge sacrifice-"

"That I allow the man who has raped and tortured me to sleep with me as his own personal form of justice? _Don't _pretend that you have any idea what I've been through, what _either _of us have been through in _sacrifice."_ She snarled, standing up as she indicated herself and Lucas, "There are things worth dying for and there are things worse than dying. If you had given me a gun in that prison I'd have put a bullet in my head, no question asked. The ultimate sacrifice is not death, it is what comes before it, and you know _nothing_ of it..."

She left the room, unable to look at him any longer.

Lucas quietly moved around the table and breathed, "I hope to God she's right and you're just playing games Harry. Whatever has come undone in your head, fix it...Before someone gets killed."

...

The cold clinical walls bore down upon her, they seemed to be squeezing ever tighter and the door at the end of the corridor was getting no closer. She hated herself, more than she should, another one of the many things that she could blame him for.

The door opened without her opening it and he invited her in, a warm smile twisting his lips beneath cruel eyes. She had barely stepped inside the room when he struck her across the head, the inviting rush of nothingness washed over her, but she knew that it was too easy...

When she regained consciousness she was lying on the bed, hands tied to the headboard behind her, the tight bands fitted perfectly with the familiar scars on her wrists.

He stood over her, smiling, a thin scalpel-sharp dagger in his hand. Like Lucas, she had a ship tattooed on her shoulder, but smaller and more elegant. The perfect black lines of which he now traced, tenderly with the blade, causing the perfect black lines to weep ruby tears.

She closed her eyes, hating herself for the weakness, but unable to look at him any longer, an action she regretted but could not take back.

Memories of her previous attacks, the vicious assaults in progress and the feelings of filth and violation following that which was somehow worse. The skin being stripped from her back by a merciless whip, the feelings that she was drowning, drowning in the shower of blood what surrounded her. She knew she wasn't drowning but he was making her body think that she was; wished that she was. To be lost to the welcoming oblivion, to know that she would never feel again.

His face loomed over her, smirking, the crimson-tainted silver blade flashed in his hands.

She woke up in a cold sweat, breathing hard. The nightmares had doubled in number and intensity since her return to The Grid. As always, her first instinct was Lucas but, as always, as her fingers closed around the cold phone on the bedside cabinet, she rejected human security and comfort, opting instead for the inanimate charm of her kettle.

Knowing she would not be sleeping that night, she quietly got dressed as she waited for the kettle to boil. Her eyes fell on the beautiful white rose, forever entombed within the soft sphere of glass enveloping it. Someone had given it to her as a gift years ago. It only really struck a chord with her now. Trapped, nowhere to go, no option but to be stared at, manipulated and exploited; passed from person to person without care or tenderness, without a choice.

She ran her fingers through her hair, almost screaming in frustration but knowing that it would wake the neighbours as she slid down the cold wall behind her, feeling pathetic and useless.

The small glass rose continued to watch her with silent innocence as she thought, _fuck it._

A/N: Honestly, I don't know how I feel about this, when I first put it down on paper I liked it, when I came to type it up a few days later, after reading several of the reviews posted on here, I changed my mind...Feel free to ignore me but I would like to know your thoughts on this chapter and whether or not my insecurities are justified.


	6. Withdrawal

**Chapter 6**

Withdrawal

Harry was sitting in the briefing room with a portion of his fractured team sitting around him. Tariq was sitting with dark circles into his eyes and staring into his umpteenth cup of coffee as though trying to decide if he could drown himself in its body clock altering depths. Ros and Ruth were exhausted as well, it had been a long shift and they all seemed intent on flogging a long since deceased horse. Harry had sent Lucas home, although there was no real authority in a decision that had already been made by someone else. God only knew where Sofia was.

"So, we know of a potential attack on the talks." Ruth began vaguely with a half-hearted attempt at forcing them into being productive.

"Based on the word of someone with borderline psychotic behaviour." Ros put in helpfully.

"Are you talking about Salko or Sofia?" Tariq asked with a knackered stab at humour.

After Lucas and Sofia had left, Harry had made the decision to tell the remainder of his team about the connection between Sofia and Salko along with the motives behind, and the cost of, his services, reasoning that in their sleep-deprived state they would probably have forgotten most of it by morning. Curiously, Ros had seemed to agree with Harry while Ruth came down on Lucas' side, stating that there was a limit to what one human being could ask of another, no matter the reward.

"Sofia thinks that Salko's intel is solid." Harry said quietly, leaving the implications of this, that they may have the fates of seven nations in their hands, unsaid.

"Whatever intel that may be." Ros put in, ever 'realistic' as she put it.

"You've met him Ros, what did you think of him?" Harry asked, hoping that she would somehow contradict Lucas and Sofia though he was not entirely sure to what end.

"In a word? Infectious." She said, choosing her words carefully.

"What do you mean?" Ruth asked, blearily.

"He...Gets under your skin, with frightening ease. Intense, bordering on insane. Perceptive, extremely...I wouldn't be playing poker with him in a hurry...He has the skill to make you feel that he knows everything about you after a five minute conversation, which he probably does...Bottom line for us is that he could be lying or telling me the truth and whichever one he wanted me to think, I would believe whatever he wanted me to. Whatever we do is a risk, something I'm sure he's aware of." She said with characteristic bluntness.

"Alright...Let's forget about Salko for a moment...Assuming the worst-"

"Because we never do that..." Ros muttered,

"After an anonymous tip-off about an attack what's our next move?"

"Stopping it."

"Yes, thank you Miss Myers."

"Finding out the target." Tariq said, a little more helpfully.

"Exactly... Several nations represented and said representatives holed up together in one small space, you want something that will cause maximum international upset, international distrust, and disruption." Ruth began.

"If I was an insane terrorist wondering what to fling through my open window of opportunity, I'd be choosing something that would cause multiple fatalities, piss everyone off, a bomb for example."

"When you begin sentences with 'if I was an insane terrorist' whatever you follow it up with always makes me glad you're on our side..." Tariq mumbled looking mildly alarmed. He was fortunate that he looked as pathetic as he did at that moment in time as it saved his shins from Ros' wrath.

"OK, assuming you're right, that would probably rule out the hotels, most nations are staying separately, not much in the way of international chaos." Ruth pointed out.

"Speaking of hotels, did you get all of the camera footage and the bugs working Tariq?" Harry asked, digressing momentarily.

Tariq groaned and said through his hands, "Yes...It only cost me eight hours and about ten years off my scarred eyeballs...Next time we stick them all in a Travelodge and be done with it."

Ruth patted him sympathetically as Ros said, "Right, so not a Travelodge, most likely one of the locations for the talks themselves is the target then? Has Skippy given us a full list of the buildings they're going to use?" Ros asked.

"No." Harry growled, "Can you meet with him and push him on that in the morning?"

"With pleasure." Ros smirked.

"Gently...We still need him to attend the talks." Harry cautioned, half-heartedly.

"Might be better for all involved if he didn't." Ros said under her breath.

Harry sighed and said, "Maybe..." Taking a deep breath he summarised, "So at the moment we _might _know about an attack of some sort on the most important political figures in the words occurring _somewhere _on British soil within the next week."

"In a nutshell." Ros said tactful as ever.

"In a nutshell we know nothing." He snapped.

They discussed the problem for over an hour achieving nothing but a circular argument and a synchronised migraine as little clumps of torn hair began to pile up beside each of them. Harry was about to suggest a large glass of whiskey and some much needed sleep before one of them throttled the other just to give them something new to discuss, when then the phone in the centre of the table began to ring.

Not being able to remember a time when he had been happier to hear a phone ring he put it on speaker saying curtly, "Harry Pearce."

"Harry." The voice was unmistakeably Sofia's, he glanced at the other's and saw his own feelings reflected in his team's faces as she continued tonelessly, "The target's not a place it's a person, the American President, he arrives tonight, unlikely but just in case, double security around him, his plane lands in less than an hour."

"Sofia-"he began, a half a dozen questions battling with one another on the tip of his tongue, none of which she allowed him to ask,

"I expect you'll be sent details tomorrow," before he could say a word she murmured hopelessly, "I'll see you in the morning." As the call disconnected.

She hung up and pressed the phone to her lips as she slowly allowed her head to rest on the chilling tiles behind her, giving her a brief glimpse of the innocent white ceiling before she closed her eyes.

Even in the comfort of her own home there was no escape...

She felt her skin crawl as his fingers once again danced cruelly across her surface. She violently began to tear at her clothes; she felt them rip beneath her frantic, scrabbling fingers as she removed them from her feverish flesh, stripping herself down to nothing. She threw the tainted pieces of fabric across the room in disgust, feeling him all over them, all over her; she shuddered and hugged herself as the thick acidic bile rose from her stomach to greet her contracting throat. Closing her eyes she attempted to regain control of herself.

On impulse, and with difficulty, she dragged herself to the shower and turned it on. Initially the stream of icy water chilled her to the bone and caused her already tense muscles ton contract further causing them to twinge and spasm; however as it heated she allowed the cascade of cool clear water to envelope her within its depths, not knowing or caring what she wanted to wash away but cleansing her of his sins all the same.

The thin silk ties he had used to bind her wrists had re-opened the scars he had first created on her thin wrists; these fresh wounds now dyed the pure, untainted water a murky crimson.

She stood beneath the understanding empathy of the water until her body went numb. She felt nothing as her fingers absently traced the cold tiles behind her, coming to rest on the temperature control. Almost without permission, they began to turn the protesting dial. The room filled with a thick steam as it heated, making it difficult to see or breathe in the small claustrophobic bathroom. The calm, soothing lukewarm river from above had transformed into a raging ocean, burning her. The pain that this provoked from her tortured body the only thing that reminded her that she was still alive.

A slow, maniacal grin spread across her face. She sank to her knees in ecstasy as angry red patches began to appear on her pale, ghostly skin.

* * *

A hushed silence had fallen over the table as they digested Sofia's words. Ruth spoke first, hollow and shocked,

"What has she done?"

"I think it's more a question of _who_ she's done." Ros said, cruelly.

"You think she went through with it?" Tariq breathed.

"I don't think she and Salko sat down with a cup of tea and he agreed to help us out of the goodness of his heart." Ros replied, roughly.

In truth, she had more understanding and more empathy with Sofia than the others, considering what had happened with her and Meynell the other year, of course that seemed feeble and barely worth mentioning in comparison with Sofia's ordeal and Ros could not imagine the frame of mind she must have been in to force herself to go through with it. Nevertheless, the similarities were striking enough to cause several horrific memories to surface for her and her defence mechanisms were kicking in as she tried to convince herself that she was fine by harshly convincing herself that Sofia was fine. Both were far from the truth.

"Harry..." Ruth said softly, "Harry, maybe someone should check up on her?"

"You think she might do something stupid?" he asked sharply, the thought jolting him out of his guilt-ridden reverie.

"I think that considering the frame of mind she's in to push herself to...I think it's a distinct possibility..." Ruth murmured softly.

"I'll go." Ros said, quietly, inadvertently revealing her true feelings in her concern for the younger woman.

"No, I'll call Lucas." Harry said firmly.

"You think sending someone in possession of a Y chromosome is a good idea given the circumstances?" Ros asked, pointedly.

"I don't think sending anyone in possession of a _head _is a good idea under the circumstances..." he said, grimly, "But she's less likely to rip his off than most. He's the only one she really trusts."

Ros agreed silently as Harry dialled Lucas' number, mercifully his pride was not such that it prevented him from answering,

"Harry?" He said, shortly.

"Lucas, have you heard from Sofia?" Harry asked, cagily.

"No, not since she left The Grid, why? What's happened? What's she done?" he asked, agitated.

""Salko." Ros said, helpfully, her sympathy was not required and neither were the skin crawling memories that were threatening to surface.

"What? Harry you-"Lucas began,

"He had nothing to do with it...She just called with information about the attacks." Ruth put in hastily before both Lucas and Harry regretted their words.

He was quiet for a moment before saying softly, "I'm on my way."

* * *

Lucas quietly climbed the stairs of the apartment complex that Sofia had been living in since her return to MI-5. She had managed to secure the room on the top floor and as a result her closest neighbours were downstairs.

After finally arriving at the door and finding, without surprise, that the 'spare key' she had given him did not work, he was forced to spend a frustrating few minutes picking the lock before it would yield to him.

He quietly entered the apartment, which in itself felt like an invasion of privacy, and made his way into the first room. The fat ginger cat silently watched him cross the room, its large, concerned green eyes following him from the top of the kitchen cupboards.

Hearing the soft hiss of the shower, and knowing what it meant, he grimly entered the bathroom.

"Shit, Sofia." He whispered, reaching over her and quickly turning it off, snarling as the scalding water burned his skin.

Gently wrapping her in a soft white towel he lifted her easily from the shower cubicle and sunk with her to the cold, tiled floor, cradling her tenderly as she shivered violently in response to the dramatic temperature change.

"Sofia." He murmured again, looking at her, deep eyes filled with concern and sympathy as he shielded her protectively as she shuddered again, though not from cold.

"Don't you dare pity me Lucas North." She hissed weakly.

They lay together, in silence, as the room cleared. Her delicate flesh was red raw and feverish, her touch burning him as she soaked his clothes to the skin. He didn't care. He was eternally grateful that Harry had called him and shudder to think what she would have done if she had been left alone in this state. The angry burn marks on her skin were enough to testify to her less than stable frame of mind.

After a while, neither of them could recall how long, she reluctantly peeled herself from him and shakily stumbled to the bedroom declining his offer of physical and mental support. He retreated to the kitchen and sought the company of the timid cat who seemed to have decided that he was alright.

Just as he was becoming concerned, she emerged from the bedroom in light, loosely fitting clothes, looking as though nothing had happened.

"Would you like tea?" she asked, calmly.

"We might need something stronger..." he muttered, respectfully keeping his distance now.

She considered this for a moment before saying, softly, "...I've spent enough of my life feeling numb...Alcohol makes me feel nothing. Tea makes me feel better."

"Tea it is..."

He watched from a comfortable distance, as she quietly made them both tea, pausing only to return the cat's affections.

She cradled her own mug in her hands while sliding his across the counter towards him, very poignantly avoiding handing it to him directly. He accepted and watched her quietly for a while before murmuring softly,

"What happened Sofia? Why?"

She considered this for some time, taking a deep steadying breath before answering flippantly in an undertone, "Insomnia's a wonderful thing...Most people walk, or read, or _drink_...I decided to prostitute myself for my country..." she trailed off and he watched her sadly, trying to think of a response. His silence prompted her to whisper, "Doe that disgust you?"

"No..." he said, truthfully, taking a cautious step towards her, instinctively reaching out to her, physically and emotionally.

"It should." She said, harshly, rejecting his advance on both levels, as she flinched, hating herself for it.

He quickly withdrew, knowing that she was not repelled by her touch but the deeper meaning that she saw behind it, in her eyes, he had attempted to initiate contact between them, taking away her control in the process.

"Why?" he breathed again.

"It disgusts me..." she murmured, the cup shaking violently in her trembling hands. "Even though I had to..."

"You didn't have to...We would have found another way, even if I had to personally hunt the bastard to the ends of the Earth..." he growled,

She watched him with empty eyes before saying quietly, "You can't protect me from everything anymore Lucas." She murmured, taking a tentative step towards him.

"You'll forgive me for trying."

"I will..." she was now very close to him now, the mug of tea abandoned on the counter by the cat.

She gently traced one of the tattoos on her wrist, connecting the five dots placed there and ironically connecting to Russia, the quincunx design symbolising imprisonment meaning, "I will not forget prison." Fitting, considering the nights events.

Her eyes slowly travelled up his body until they found his. Deep, full of concern and passion. He held her gaze, refusing to break the connection between. He gently touched her skin in return, knowing that she was inviting him to do so, her muscles tensed but it was instinct over choice, as she held his gaze,

"Come to bed." She whispered softly.

"Sofia-"he began gently, understanding completely and hating himself for what he had to say.

"No, Lucas, please, I need to feel. I need to feel _something_." Her voice cracked, "I trust you, I'm safe with you, this can't be it, I can't feel just, _nothing_, I can't, I need you Lucas." The desperation in her voice hurt him more than any physical torture.

"No." He said, gently, taking her arms and pushing her away from him. He understood, a little too well, her body recognised what was happening to it and had caused her to go numb from the inside out, in order to stop her feeling what it had come to learn she would feel. In some ways however, the cure was worse than what it was trying to protect her from, she needed something to remind her that she was still alive, and that she was capable of living, be it sex or boiling water, she was craving feeling like a drug, and the withdrawal was killing her.

In a sense he knew what she was going through, it was psychologically similar to the isolation technique that had been used to startling effect on him in Russia, a beating you hated turned to one you craved after days of empty silence, anything to know that you were not alone. He could feel what she was going through and his heart told her to give her what she thought she needed, his head told him that they would both regret the decision in the morning.

"Come on." He led her quietly to the bedroom for entirely different reasons and allowed her to curl up on his chest, one arm wrapped around her, a little too reminiscent of Russia, but better than the alternative. She finally closed her eyes and surrendered herself to the exhaustion that had been clawing at her, unheard, for hours. He gradually felt himself slipping out of consciousness and joining her in the uncertain world of dreams that extended beyond them.

_Eight oppressive, black little churches stood silently side by side on a lonely hill. Each contained a different horror, none of which he could escape. One, electrocution, two, water boarding, three, relentless beatings, they began to blur together as he became surrounded by empty silence before being ruthlessly whipped, the skin on his back reluctantly parting company with him, then the sound of a tap dripping endlessly in the room beside him, preventing him from sleeping. Promises of freedom and lies about his family's deaths at home. Sofia's piercing screams providing a horrific soundtrack to his nightmare._

He woke, panting, and drenched in sweat, Sofia's cries still ringing in his ears as disjointed sounds and images chased one another through his damaged mind. Sofia was not with him, he was alone in the soft bed, miles away from the cold stone floor that he found himself craving. Looking around himself, still breathing hard as he attempted to shake the vivid dreams and control himself, he saw Sofia perched on a chair by the window, staring helplessly out of it, one foot on the floor, the other resting on the seat, leg pressed close to her chest. He watched the slow rise and fall of her delicate frame in time with her breathing,

"What happened?" She asked, softly, without turning around. There was no pressure in it, she knew perfectly well what had happened and was giving him the option to expand and share his feelings, something that, given her delicate state, he decided against,

"The usual. "He muttered casually, sitting on the end of the bed and running his hands over his face as his breathing returned to normal. "You?"

"The usual...With a modern twist..."

"How long have you been awake?"

"A while..."

She looked weak and fragile, silhouetted against the dawn sky, cold and blank, unable to look at him. The vulnerability and desperation that had dictated her actions the night before was gone, replaced by cold, cruel instinct.

"It shouldn't be this difficult..." she whispered hollow, "After the number of times he's...This was just Monday before, now..." she broke off, swallowing hard and sounding frustrated with herself, "Is there such a thing as 'consensual rape'?" she asked, as her voice cracked.

He got up from the bed and walked towards her," Don't." She choked. He paused a foot from her before she crumpled in on herself and reached out, allowing him to approach. He delicately wrapped his arms protectively around her shoulders, making her feel as though she was holding him together, and placed a soft kiss on the top of her head. She closed her eyes as angry tears spilled from under them and she wiped them away impatiently.

"How long do we have?" she asked hoarsely.

"A few hours...You should sleep." He told her softly.

She laughed, almost hysterically at his words a bitter edge to her voice as she said, "Sleep?"

"You need it," he pressed, knowing that he would not be able to convince her to stay at home and rest; she would insist on going in to work and all the tea in China would not change her mind. She in turn seemed to sense that he would not let this go. She slowly got up and padded back to the bed.

He held her, softly stroking her hair as she lay listening, as she so often had, to the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest that accompanied his hypnotic, steady breathing. "Thank you." She whispered softly as he gently ran a hand over her eyes, causing her eyelids to cover them, blocking out the cruel world.

* * *

A/N: Because of its content I really wanted this chapter to be perfect. As much as it was written on instinct and impulse, it was also very deliberate and I don't know if I've now over thought it...I know that, in order for this to work in the way I intended, that everything must be done right, this chapter as very much character driven so I'm a little out of my comfort zone and I would really appreciate your thoughts on this, if you have a minute, please review and let me know how this chapter struck you :)


	7. Through The Looking Staff

**Chapter 7**

Through the Looking Staff

Sofia attempted a few more hours of broken sleep before Lucas decided that she was doing more harm than good, continually waking, screaming in terror and in the end he suggested that they make an early start.

He himself had not returned to bed and could feel himself slipping into one of his regular bouts of insomnia and knew that he would be becoming intimately reacquainted with the unyielding cold stone floor of his apartment for the foreseeable future.

They stopped off at a Starbucks on the way to pick up coffee as, for one reason or another, both of them were running on adrenaline. Lucas tried, and failed, to force her to eat anything, while barely being able to stomach his coffee, after a plethora of threats and promises, all of which were ignored, he gave up and they left the cramped cafe, something Sofia couldn't have been more relieved about.

They wandered onto the deserted Grid and settled themselves at their desks. It was not yet six o'clock in the morning and neither of them had expected anyone other than themselves to be populating The Grid this early, as a result they both jumped as Harry floated from his office towards them.

"Morning." Sofia said calmly, recovering first.

"Sofia." Harry said curtly, a part of him was surprised to see her, another part of him was becoming rapidly desensitised to shocks concerning her.

Deciding to wait and allow her to settle a little before discussing her unhealthy dedication to her work, he turned to Lucas, the younger man had not acknowledged his presence and Harry knew that this was fully justified, nevertheless, it had to be done,

"Lucas, a word?"

He silently rose from his desk and entered Harry's office the latter following and closing the door behind them.

"How is she?" Harry asked, taking a seat behind the desk and watching as Lucas pointedly balanced on the cabinet on the other side of the room.

"Alive." Lucas said shortly, before adding without thought, "Don't pretend that you care Harry."

"Of course I care, she's a member of this team I-"

"Don't bullshit me Harry. She's about as much a member of this team as I am right now, the sooner you accept what everyone else has the better. You wouldn't have treated Ros in that way and don't even get me started on Ruth."

Harry was slightly taken aback. It was out of character for the usually composed and well-spoken younger man to interrupt him and be as disrespectful, mitigating circumstances or not. It had always made an impression on him that Lucas could be the quietest contributor to a conversation but when he spoke he was listened to, without exception and without question. The hypnotic quality to his voice was invaluable in this line of work, but at that moment Harry hated it.

"If you're implying that I had something to do with this-"he began again.

"Of course you did." Lucas said, dismissively, "You all but booked them a hotel."

"I don't think my personal feelings towards this made any difference, she made her thoughts on my input into her life perfectly clear."

Lucas considered this, he was probably right, Sofia had made her decision the second she had seen the rose on the screen and grasped its meaning, however he was loathe to let Harry off scot free, what he had said to her had been completely inappropriate, serious or not, and whether or not it had affected her decision, it had affected her in some way.

"What _are _your personal feelings on this?" Lucas asked, softly.

Harry paused, knowing that what he said would have far reaching consequences, "It doesn't matter anymore, what's done is done." He replied, evasively.

"It matters. " Lucas said, shortly, forcing the other to make eye contact with him.

"Yes, but not to you." Harry said, coldly, meaning to close down their conversation.

"It does matter to me Harry." Lucas said, standing, he knew full well that Harry was not going to give him a straight answer but he could guess his feelings and would play on them all the same, "You stole eight years of my life, hers too. This just makes me wonder where you draw the line, when we stop being pieces on a chessboard to you."

Lucas knew this was cruel, and unfair, knew that Harry still felt guilty about his involvement in Lucas' imprisonment, and that no amount of time could make him stop going over the deaths of his officers and allow himself to sleep at night, but that was the reason he had said it.

Lucas left before Harry could respond. Another thing he often forgot about the younger man was the quiet precision with which he could read people. Once he had, accurately, identified their deepest fears and knew what caused them the most pain in this world, he could choose to manipulate them in any way he saw fit. He was just as capable of talking someone down from the roof as he was at making them jump. In the eight years he had stolen from him he had developed this skill into an art.

* * *

While Lucas and Harry had been ensconced in the latter's office talking morals and philosophy, Ros had returned to The Grid to prepare for talking politics and frustration. She had a meeting with the Home Secretary that was looming over her like a sugar coated poison. She had been slightly alarmed to find Sofia calmly sitting at her desk sipping coffee when she had entered the room.

"Morning." Ros said, as naturally as she could, meaning that she came across about as natural as a winged dinosaur flapping past Thames House.

"Morning." Sofia replied, with far more success.

"Where are Harry and Lucas?" Ros asked to stop herself from asking the more pressing and relevant question of 'why the fuck are you here?'

"Harry's office, discussing 'War and Peace' and everything in between." Sofia replied, reading the question dancing tantalizingly on the tip of Ros' tongue.

"Any coffee left?" Ros asked, awkwardly, God how she hated small talk.

"Yeah, there's a Starbucks down the road." Sofia replied with a smirk, sharing her senior officer's sentiments on small talk.

"Are you OK?" Ros asked, bluntly, dropping the act.

"If I wasn't I wouldn't be here." Sofia said, calmly.

"Right." Ros snorted before adding more gently, "Listen, if you need some time to rest, get your head together-"

"No." She replied, shortly before feeling obliged to add, "My head will fall apart if I don't have something to do...Something other than watching paint dry, which is preferable to current daytime television."

Ros nodded, understanding. She sensed that she was pushing it, but her empathy with the younger woman and therefore her irritating, but irrepressible instinct to help her won out over her reason, "Look, I know how you feel, the same thing happened to me a few years ago...Lucas and Harry, can never understand, not really, what we go through, if you ever need to talk..." she trailed off, being forcibly reminded of a conversation she had had with Jo and fearing that she was going soft, however the similarities ended there as Sofia replied, coldly,

" That's wonderful Ros, thank you for telling me, but at the moment what I really need is for you to stop patronizing me and remember that this is not the first time in my life I've dealt with this. _Don't _try and tell me you know what I'm going through." She caught herself then, knowing that it would have been difficult for Ros to discuss, even obliquely, something that had been so personal to her, her comments had also suggested that she thought whatever Ros had been through was insignificant compared to what she had endured, no matter how violent and how often it was repeated, rape was a horrific ordeal and she had not meant to belittle the other woman's horror. She had turned her back on the other woman as she deposited a few files on Ruth's desk, but did not need to look at her to know the expression on her colleague's face, "I'm sorry that was uncalled for." She said, turning back to face her.

"No, no not at all, I apologise too, I didn't mean to patronize you." She said, thinking how she must have come across, I had sex with someone I wasn't too comfortable with once a few years ago while you were relentlessly and violently assaulted in a Russian prison, well done Myers, that's _exactly _the same thing...

"It's alright." Sofia murmured, _get a grip on yourself, she's your senior officer._

Both women had reached an understanding based on what they had said to one another and, more importantly, on what they had not. They both knew that they could move on without treading on eggshells around each other for the next three days.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, "You're a little early for your meeting, the Home Secretary won't even have finished his Rice Crispies yet."

Ros snorted and replied, I'm preparing for said meeting, I didn't have the patience to go over everything last night." She explained before raising her eyebrows, "And I could ask you the same question."

"Couldn't sleep." Sofia said matter-of-factly, as Ros froze, mortified by her own lack of judgment she added, smirking, "And I needed rid of Lucas."

The last, flippant comment diffused the momentary tension that had flared up between them.

"Limpet?" Ros suggested, smiling slightly.

Sofia nodded, "Don't get me wrong, I love the man and I'm grateful for his support but..._you _know." She said, throwing a small smirk in Ros' direction as she emphasised the word 'you'.

"What do you mean by that?" Ros asked, sharply, before kicking herself and realising from Sofia's fleeting smirk, that she had fallen into her trap.

"Well I can only imagine how over-protective he became after the hotel explosion..." she grinned,

"God..."Ros breathed, recovering.

Sofia laughed slightly and said, "When are you meeting the Home Secretary?"

"About an hour, care to join me? I don't think you've been introduced yet."

"Need someone to hold your hand?" she teased.

"No, but someone may be required to hold his in the ambulance if he starts." She replied, instantly.

Sofia laughed but slowly shook her head. Ros shrugged and began packing up her files in preparation for leaving, keeping to herself the feeling of how much the younger woman had unnerved her. She was so cold, and cut off from what had happened that Ros was almost beginning to think it had not, only the thin, inflamed red scars on her wrists, mostly concealed beneath a watch and some light jewellery, were the only things that betrayed the horror their owner had been put through.

Sofia had had her meltdown, her moment of vulnerability and weakness in the confines of her apartment with only Lucas ever being privy to it. Now the defences had kicked in and the shutters had come down. Not being able to deal with sudden, violent rape in prison was a weakness, and was likely to get you killed if you couldn't cope with it. One short burst of intense emotions and then nothing...It was the only way she knew how to survive.

However as Lucas left Harry's office and Ruth simultaneously entered the room with a look that would have been appropriate on a drugged goldfish, she allowed a moment of weakness to show through the many cracks of her damaged exterior and said, "I might take you up on that, God help the Home Secretary if he has to go to hospital with only you for company."

In truth she could not stand the thought of her colleagues goggling her like a traumatised fish in a bowl all morning. She was sure that Ros knew this too but she knew better than to comment and simply threw her the car keys and her coat with a fleeting smile.

A/N: I think after the last chapter I needed something to take the edge off and I enjoyed playing about with the various character interactions. There will be a bit more of that in the next chapter but also some more plot, I haven't forgotten about the big picture, I'm just taking my sweet time in revealing it all. Thank you all for your reviews once again :)


	8. Precious Time

**Chapter 8**

Precious Time

Ruth headed straight for Harry's office, Lucas having just left it.

"Harry, what the Hell is she doing here?"

"Good morning to you too Miss Evershed."

"You should have sent her home, not to the Home Secretary." She persisted.

"I didn't send her to-"

"Harry, she was raped. You can't just deal with that in the way you deal with everything else in here that falls into the category of 'personal', you can't pretend that this hasn't happened. And you can't let her do that either."

Harry chose to ignore the second meaning to this and focussed on the bit he could at least have a stab at answering "If Sofia's made up her mind, and is ready to come back, nothing I can say will change that."

"You're suspended." She retorted flatly.

"I can't do that Ruth; you know what that would mean for her, personally and professionally." Harry said, not being able to recall a time recently when he had been as tempted to seek solace in a good measure of whiskey, this early into the day.

"Yes, but what could it mean for her, and us, if you consider the alternative. The same thing happened with Jo, you ignored it, she wasn't dealing with it, and look how that ended up-" she broke off, "Harry I'm sorry I..." she left, flushing crimson before he had time to formulate something that would pass as a response.

"Hello." She muttered to Lucas as he passed.

"Morning." He said, stiffly.

"How is she doing?" Ruth asked, cautiously.

"As well as can be expected...She'll pull through."

"When though?" Ruth said, without thinking.

"I know what you're thinking Ruth, it won't work, she needs something to do...Something more meaningful than watching Loose Women and overdosing on tea."

"You know her that well?"

"Better than she knows herself."

"Well then, you should-"

"I know her better than you do Ruth, leave it alone." He said quietly, walking away from her.

He had been trying painfully hard to build bridges with Ruth, something she had noticed, over the past few weeks, but at the moment he cared more about Sofia than Ruth holding grudges.

He knew that Ruth meant well, but her judgement was clouded by what had happened to Jo, she could not understand that Sofia did not want help, and could never come to terms with the fact that, as far as her work was concerned, it was ancient history. Lucas knew that in her personal life she would be more than affected by this, and the trauma would haunt her for months to come, not only because of what he had done to her in London, but also because of the memories that would return to her from Russia.

He had found them revisiting him in his dreams last night, and if an oblique mention of the horrors of prison had done that to him then he could not begin to comprehend what it was doing to her. Nevertheless, the place she would have needed Ruth to be was not where she was. Sofia compartmentalized, Ruth was work, not personal life, there would be no crossover, Ruth would never be allowed to enter into that part of her life, they had only known each other for a few weeks. As a colleague she was OK, as a friend, she was far from it.

* * *

Sofia and Ros were sitting, one patiently, the other not, in the Home Secretary's lavishly decorated office.

"The money they could have saved on silver candlesticks and antique rugs would be enough to pull us out of the recession." Sofia muttered with distaste, even after three years, the beauty of prison minimalism had never quite lost its appeal for her.

"You can propose that to him now, solve our countries financial debts." Ros hissed back, personally she could not imagine the room looking any other way and immediately told herself she had been spending too much time in it.

"Here he comes." Ros muttered as the Home Secretary practically bounced up to meet them.

"If he attempts to hug me, can I shoot him?" Sofia enquired in an undertone.

"Just be sure to miss all the important bits." Ros replied.

"Good morning Miss Myers, my apologies for the late arrival, oh, now who are you?" he asked, squinting at Sofia but mercifully taking a seat behind his desk without attempting the awkward embrace he had enveloped a very bemused Ros in.

"Sofia Fletcher, latest addition to Section D." Ros supplied helpfully.

"Pleased to meet you." The Home Secretary beamed, "Welcome to our own little slice of this mad world."

"Thank you for letting me live in it." She replied, studying the man opposite her.

"So, to business, to what do I owe this pleasure?" he asked, turning back to Ros.

"Unfortunately Home Secretary, you'll soon learn that visits from us are rarely pleasant. Harry Pearce sent me to bring you up to speed on our current situation."

"Alright..." he said, a little wrong-footed following the abrupt change in the tone of the conversation, "So speed me up."

"We have received intelligence of an attack on the American President while he is here attending the peace talks." Ros said with her usual brutal efficiency.

"That's terrible." He blustered; if he had been wrong-footed beforehand he was now sprawled on the floor at her feet, "Where is this intelligence coming from?"

"Given the nature of their information our source wishes to remain anonymous, however it is reliable..." Ros said confidently, though her eyes flicked towards Sofia for a fraction of a second.

"Very well...What do you need from me?"

"What makes you think we want anything?" Ros asked, paraphrasing, the word 'need' was not in her vocabulary.

"I'm not that dense Miss Myers, please credit me with a modicum of intelligence and a working knowledge of the recent technological advances that have led to the development of the mobile phone." He said, the schoolboy persona slipping for a moment.

"We need the list of locations that the government plan on using for the talks; we have to identify a target for this attack."

"Frankly Miss Myers, there's no can do, the er, while the locations are still up for discussion." He said, hitching the cover of ignorance back onto his face with supreme ease, "When I know, you'll know."

"Frankly Home Secretary, I think that's bullshit." Sofia said flatly, before Ros could respond with a more acceptable answer, causing both of them to stare at her. She continued when no-one else seemed inclined to fill the silence, "Please credit _us _with a modicum of intelligence and the ability to know when we are being lied to."

"You have your hands full with her." The Home Secretary chuckled, conspiratorially to Ros.

"So do you." She said swiftly, her curiosity got the better of her and caused her to refrain from reprimanding her younger colleague; however like Sofia she bought neither his words, nor his boyish attitude. "These talks have been in the works for months, the locations would have been decided on weeks ago; don't play games with me Home Secretary."

He watched them for a moment, trying to decide what to do with the veiled threat in Ros' words, choosing his carefully now he said, "Honestly, the North Korean's have been very jumpy, they've been at this point before and backed out because they felt that the people they were doing deals with were untrustworthy, they pulled out at the last minute, we cannot have that happen again. As a result, we've been forced to include them, discreetly, at every stage of the preparation process, they were particularly insistent on keeping the location of these talks a secret."

"Well, as your _secret_ service, we'll do our very best not to post the locations on Facebook." Sofia said sardonically.

"Of course, of course, "he muttered, distractedly, "I'll have copies sent up for you at once." He said, calling through to his PA and requesting the documents in question.

A silent battle of wits ensued, as each of them tried to guess the others thoughts, both the Home Secretary and Ros were watching Sofia, he broke the silence first,

"By the way Miss Fletcher, do I detect an accent that tells me you're not from London?"

This was news to Ros and thought he was hallucinating, Sofia on the other hand looked mildly impressed, "Yes you do." She said, slowly.

"Ha!" he said, triumphantly, "May I ask where?"

"Scotland." She said, with a small smile, "I thought I'd all but lost the accent, I moved to London when I was about sixteen and I've spent a considerable amount of time, _abroad _in recent years." She explained.

"Gone but not forgotten." He smiled, "It's a beautiful part of the country isn't it?"

"When it's not raining..." she commented drily, with a small smile.

"Yes of course." He laughed softly.

The door opened and a young, thin, dark haired woman deposited a large swathe of papers on his desk. He dismissed her with a wave of his hand and began to flick through them before handing two identical files to Sofia and Ros,

"Well, here you are ladies, I hope these will help."

"Certainly, thank you Home Secretary."

"Anytime." He replied with a winning smile.

"So, what do you think of the Home Secretary?" Ros asked, as they left his office.

"I'm not entirely sure...On one hand I want to give him a gold star and see if I can be the first to observe spontaneous human combustion; on the other hand I want to shoot him and get it over with, I don't entirely buy the schoolboy act."

"It's good isn't it?" Ros said, smirking.

"Very...Almost makes me wonder..."

"What?"

"You've seen the Lord of the Rings?"

"Yes..."Ros said, slowly, hoping this was going somewhere,

"You remember Gollum?"

"The schizophrenic nutcase? Vividly..."

"There was a woman in the prison I was held in, in Russia, they called her Gollum, she was schizo, obviously, one minute she'd be offering you her roll at lunch, the next she'd try and drown you in your soup bowl...The guards thought she was lying, making it up, they kept trying to break her, they didn't realise she was already broken...He reminds me of her."

"So you think our Home Secretary's schizophrenic?"

"I don't know what I think...The point was that people make assumptions, they see something and think they've figured it out, the guards tortured her continuously for days to get her to drop the act, as a result she had a psychotic break and killed herself, don't judge a book by its cover and all that..."

"It's a convincing cover..."

"Very."

"What are you thinking?"

"I'm trying to decide if I prefer him as an honest fool, or a lying scholar..."

"Lying scholar." Ros replied, without hesitation, "He's of more use to me that way and I can beat the irritating part out of him."

Sofia chuckled, "What did you think of his excuse for not giving us the location?"

"I don't know, if he's telling the truth then it's not good for us, jumpy North Koreans are the last thing we need. If they get jumpy the others will too, we could end up creating the problem we're attempting to fix. If he's lying..."

"Also not good for us...Still it's not a priority as of yet, we'll beat it out of him later."

...

The team were gathered around the large rectangular table in the briefing room when Ros and Sofia returned.

Tariq, who looked as though he had rolled from his bed and into his chair, gawked at Sofia, no-one having warned him that she had returned to work, as she took her seat opposite Lucas, she glared at him and demanded, "Have I grown an extra head?"

"No, sorry..." he mumbled, sheepishly.

"How did it go with the Home Secretary?" Harry asked no-one in particular.

"He dropped the rainbow act long enough to give us the location of the talks." Ros said,

"Act? What are you thinking?" Ruth asked.

"That you're too paranoid for your own good." Ros shot back

"And the lawyer calls the politician a liar." Lucas smiled, intervening smoothly, "Do you think he's involved in this?"

"I don't know, I just think butter would melt a Hell of a lot faster in his mouth than in mine." She said darkly.

"Please let there be a God to save us all in that case." Lucas smirked.

"Alright, enough speculation about the Home Secretary, let's stick to what we know." Harry broke in before Ros launched herself across the table at the still smirking Lucas.

"Which is what?" Sofia asked, "What did you get from Salko?"

Harry paused, "Nothing." He said bluntly, realising that there was no way to dress it up and make it acceptable.

"Nothing?" she repeated tonelessly. The calm, almost comical atmosphere had drained like a water balloon hit by a bullet.

"No." Harry said quietly.

"Sofia took a deep breath, memories of his assault wrenching her momentarily from the table.

"I think it's high time we brought Mr. Salko in for a friendly chat." Ros murmured, no-one fucked with her team.

"Indeed, I only agreed to let him screw me once." Sofia hissed, darkly.

A/N: I hope these chapters haven't felt too much like 'fillers' but the previous few and the next few look to being a bit heavy and I needed to inject some sort of humour into it, spooks humour of course :) Anyway, thank you all for reading and reviewing so far, I hope you'll continue to do the same :)


	9. Hunters Hunted

**Chapter 9**

Hunters Hunted.

A grim silence had descended over the table broken by Ros,

"So it we want to find Salko, where do we start?"

"Mexico." Lucas said flatly, "There's no way he's still here, if it was me I would have left as soon as I had what I wanted."

"But he doesn't have what he wants." Ruth said quietly, everyone turned to look at her and she added defensively to Sofia, "Does he?"

"No." She agreed softly, "He still wants the truth about Nicole."

"Which is what exactly?" Ros asked, impatiently.

"I don't know either...I've spent the last three years trying to find out, nothing. I was just a piece in a much bigger puzzle; I barely understood my part never mind anyone else's. At the time I didn't care...I guess you could say he made me curious." She murmured, "Still, this is just another way of playing us."

"Sofia's right, this is just another way of manipulating us. If he's in this country I want him found." Harry said, firmly.

"Any ideas?" Ros asked no-one in particular.

"He's intelligent, he'll know we'll be looking for him, we won't just be able to knock on the door of his hotel room." Sofia began with touches of Ros' signature optimism.

"SO what do you suggest?" Harry asked, definitely not needing two Ros' in his life.

"We need to offer him something he can't say no to, something that will draw him out into the open." Lucas said quietly.

"Alright, so what do you want to use for bait?" Harry asked, eyes narrowed.

"Simple, we dangle Sofia from the roof and wait for him to come running." Ros smirked.

"Let's call that plan B." Lucas retorted, "He wants information about his sister, I'd say that's a good place to start."

"Unfortunately, we don't have the information ourselves to give him." Harry said dejectedly.

"What?"

"I checked, all files relating to that operation have been removed from the system."

"That's convenient." Sofia muttered under her breath.

"What do you mean by that?" Harry demanded sharply.

"Sounds like a cover up to me, somebody's hiding something." She said softly, staring intently at him.

"Be that as it may, we don't have time to play hide and seek." Ros said, intervening to play peacemaker for once, "We'll deal with that later if we have to, right now, we need information on this attack, preferably _before _it takes place."

"Provided there is an attack to get information on." Harry said grimly.

"What are you-"Sofia began

"All we have to base this on is the vague theory of an attack on the American President that anyone could have invented, from an ex-FSB guard who has already proven to be fixated on one thing and one thing alone. If this was any other informant in any other situation we would have serious doubts."

"But it's not any other informant, or any other situation it's the here and now, Salko isn't some over-enthusiastic extremist he's a highly skilled manipulator who knows exactly what he wants and how he's going to get it."

"And so far he seems to have exactly what he wants and we haven't got anything in return." Harry retorted. He was rapidly losing patience with playing cat and mouse with Artem Salko.

"He has more to give us, and we will get it."

"Oh and you're sure about that are you?"

"You think I slept with him on a hunch?" she spat, she had been attempting to avoid bringing this up, but Harry had backed her into a corner and her rational thought was making a rapid exit, along with his temper.

"I don't think that the methods used to obtain this information, extreme or otherwise, should have any influence over the actual information itself, which is, if we're being brutally honest here, useless." She snapped irritably.

"The methods shouldn't and don't matter, the character of the informant should." She replied, quietly, the more irate he became, the calmer she remained, "It didn't matter what he asked for it mattered that _he_ asked. I-"

"Exactly. You are too close to this." He snapped, "It's clouding your judgement."

"My judgement is just fine." She breathed, her eyes narrowed dangerously, "And I don't remember your judgement, or mine, coming in to question when you were telling me to jump into bed with Salko and get us information." She hissed coldly, causing the others to stare at Harry.

"I did not ask you to do that." Harry said, throat dry.

"Not in as many words...You didn't have to. I didn't need told; I knew full well I had to do it. Salko's not stupid, and he knows better than to lie to me. He knows, _exactly _what's going on, he knows that there needs to be a threat to give himself something to hold over us. He needs control. No attack, no bargaining chip, no bargaining chip no control, no control no Salko."

"If he wants to keep his precious control over us, then he needs us to believe that he has something to control us with and at the moment I'm not so sure that I do."

"He's given us just enough. A target, a fairly obvious one but then there are plenty of them to choose from in that room. He in turn feels the same way about us; we haven't given him enough to relinquish his hold on his information. He got what he asked for, but not what he wanted."

"OK. So what do we do about him?" Ros asked quietly; keen to move the conversation on and intervening again before Harry could protest any further. She for one trusted her younger colleague's judgement on this matter, and trusted her own judgement of Salko to know that he knew far more than he had told them and that he knew the value of his knowledge.

There was silence until Ruth said, cautiously, "There might be something in Lucas' honey trap theory."

"Except for the _slight _technical hitch that is we don't have any honey to set it with." Ros said coolly."In case we all needed reminding why we moved on from that."

"Maybe we should have, maybe we shouldn't." Ruth continued stubbornly, "All we need him to do is reveal himself, we don't actually need him to walk through the doors of MI-5 and into one of our interview rooms, we just need him to show himself for long enough to let us find him and give him a shove in that direction..."

"All we need is a way to communicate with him, force him out into the open." Lucas supplied helpfully, cottoning on to what she was getting at, "If we can get him to make a call or an e-mail, some form of contact we can trace him yes?"

"No problem." Tariq shrugged, "But we can't rely on him spontaneously calling or e-mailing us, I need to know its him, I can't just track every phone and e-mail account in this country."

"How did he make contact initially?" Harry asked.

"Phone call." Tariq said, "Disposable, pay-as-you-go, untraceable." He added hastily, seeing several people around the table sit up in interest.

"OK so how do we tell him we want to talk? Smoke signals?" Ros said sarcastically.

"That might not be a bad idea." Lucas muttered, a faraway look in his eyes,

"Speaking of smoking..." Ros said, looking at him in mild concern.

"To tell him, we tell everyone." He said, cryptically.

"What?" Ros asked, not in the mood to start playing mind-readers.

"A generalised news broadcast, something like that. A missing persons, it looks like the news to everyone else but there's something specific that draws him in. We set up a secure phone line and put out a number, you know the type, a hotline appealing to information from the public. Even if he uses a disposable phone again, we can still trace it while it's active right?"

"Right, but he has to call in first and someone would have to keep him on the line for a decent amount of time."

"Do you think he'll bite?" Ros asked, turning to Sofia.

"I don't think he'll be able to resist. I've refused to give him this information for over a decade; he'll think this is his doing, that he's left us with no choice but this. He won't be able to say no, even if the rational part of him says it's a trap, the crazy part will win out."

"Alright...What can we put in this broadcast to lure him in, it needs to be subtle, no neon signs or people will start questioning it, the last thing I want is news of this getting to the press." Harry said.

Sofia hesitated and scribbled on a sheet of paper, "Our missing person now has a name." She said, pushing the scrap of paper into the middle of the table for them all to read, _Alice Lokson._

"You think that will be enough?" Harry asked, doubtfully.

"I think that will be a neon sign." She said, firmly, "He sees her in places she's not, that will stick out like a goth at a tea party."

Harry paused, glanced around at his team and then said, "Do it."

They had a segment prepared about Alice Lockson's disappearance and ready to air by the lunch time news. It was fairly routine; they announced that the young woman had been missing for three days and that the police were appealing for information. A touch that Sofia added to the description was that of an intricate tattoo, cruelly referencing one that Nicole had had on the small of her back. She said it was to draw Salko's attention, Ros was sure it was the beginnings of her revenge against him. Whatever the reason she let it stand. At the end of the report were the details of a number the public could call if they had any information on the case.

Any calls that came through, of which, as Tariq pointed out, there were a large number considering the fact that she was a photshopped woman, were directed to MI-5 where Tariq then ran through them through voice recognition software based on a recording taken from Salko's initial contact.

In less than an hour they got a hit.

"Harry! I've got him!"

Tariq may only have called for Harry but every member of the team still on The Grid flocked to him. Ros and Lucas had headed out for the hotel room that Salko had met Sofia in, they had no intention of finding him there but hoped that they would find _something _of use, as neither of them able to stomach sitting aimlessly pushing paper, and both of them were getting jumpy, Harry had allowed them to go. Ruth, Sofia and Harry however had remained on The Grid and were now gathered around the computer.

As Tariq prepared to put the call through he told Sofia, "You need to keep him talking until the trace is complete. It should only take about two minutes but don't hold me to that; the software's a bit temperamental."

Sofia nodded, she already knew this but she also appreciated that Tariq was on edge and needed to do _something _to rid him of his built up energy. With a nod in her direction, Tariq connected her to and the voice on the other end of the line said, softly,

"Babochka." The Russian word for butterfly, referencing Nicole's tattoo.

"I know what you want." She told him, softly as Tariq started the trace.

"No, I know what _you _want. I cannot know that you know what I want."

"You and I both know that's bullshit." She said flatly, "You know I've had this information for years, you wouldn't have called otherwise, and we could go round in circles all day with me pointing out that I have no reason to believe you either, and given your recent actions I should just say fuck you and hang up now." She said, so convincingly that Tariq widened his eyes in her direction and nodded towards the computer screen.

"But you won't."

"No...We need each other. I trust you Artem and you have to trust me too."

"Unfortunately I don't." He hissed, "How do I know for example, that you aren't tracing this call?"

Sofia glanced at Tariq before answering and he shook his head, the programme had barely begun working, "You don't. But your reason should tell you something, although, no, wait yes now I remember, I'm tracing this call and there are MI-5 officers standing outside right now, patiently waiting for us to finish this conversation before they arrest you so let's not keep them waiting any longer." She spat sarcastically, "I've been crediting you with far too much intelligence in this Artem, if I wanted you, I wouldn't have let you go when I had you."

They waited in silence holding their breaths collectively as the tracing software mocked them by stalling at that particular moment.

"What do you want?" he said, tonelessly.

"To meet." She said, calmly.

"Why?"

"Because I can't pass up another opportunity to see your beautiful face." She snapped, his voice, combined with the words she had just spoken were making her skin crawl, but she would never give him the satisfaction of knowing that, or Harry for that matter, "Why do you think? I need proof and I don't want MI-5 involved just yet."

She was taking a huge risk with this last, impulsive, statement. If he saw through her, he would cut the call, but Tariq was still frantically trying to force the trace to resume and she needed some way to play for time if nothing else.

He swore in Russian, "I too have credited you with too much intelligence, and you have not given me enough, what do you take me for? You are working with them, you always have been." He spat. She could hear him removing the phone from his ear and she tried desperately not to let her panic show through as Harry Ruth and Tariq blanched,

"You think MI-5 was the reason for last night? You think I would have let you rape me because some officious bastard in a suit told me to? You think I would go through _that _for MI-5?" it was the first time she had alluded to Salko's assault as full out rape, previously having skirted around it, he too seemed to grasp the weight of this as he paused while she continued, "I said I needed information, not we. Devil's in the details Artem, and you're missing them."

It was enough, whether or not he fully believed her, her argument was intriguing enough to keep him on the line, which was all they really cared about as the trace proceeded at a snail's pace, "And why do _you _need it?"

"Because MI-5 need it." She said flatly. He swore again and she hastily cut him off, "Really Artem? What the Hell is wrong with you? Think! I don't give a damn if someone shoots the American President between the eyes, probably won't do the brainless bastard any harm, and I know you don't give a damn either. But MI-5 care, and therefore I want the thing that they'll do more to get their hands on than they will a hundred nuclear warheads, _information_. Money can't buy me my secrets. But they won't be able to refuse m information."

"_If _I give you any."

"Don't play games with me Artem. There's more than one way to skin a cat as they say, we can both get access to our information in other ways but, under sufferance or not, we've started down this path now. We both know what our information means to the other, and we both know each other to well to screw them."

"Very well...We can meet. Whether or not you feel the same about me, _I_ would like to see your beautiful face one more time." She could _see_ the smirk that accompanied this last and forced it out of her head.

Tariq, who sensed the conversation to be winding up gesticulated furiously towards the computer screen causing Sofia to wonder if he was having a stroke until she saw that the trace had still not finished, she had to keep him talking.

"Alright. Since you seem keen on visiting London's tourist attractions, why don't we go for Big Ben this time?" she suggested quickly.

"No." He said flatly, out of the corner of her eye she saw Tariq's shoulders slump in relief and knew that the trace had completed, something that Salko seemed to know to as he said, "You can come to the address you've traced this phone call to. And now I _am_ paying attention to details, _you _come, and you come alone."

He hung up and Sofia smiled ruefully as harry Ruth and Tariq gaped at the phone.

"He's good." Tariq muttered, running a hand through his hair.

"Too good." Ruth murmured.

"Yes, you did well Sofia." Said Harry, distractedly.

"Why would he do that?" Ruth demanded, "Stay on the line and allow us to track a cal that he _knew _was being traced? Could he be faking Tariq, making it look as though he was somewhere he wasn't fool us into walking into a trap?"

"No, not without letting me know that he was messing with the trace." Tariq said, shaking his head.

"Then why-"

"Because it does this. Makes us doubt ourselves, makes us panic. It makes him feel like he's got the upper hand, he thinks if he can make us believe that he knows everything about our operation that he can manipulate us based on lucky guesses, that that lets him dictate what he wants to be done. What he doesn't know is that Ros and Lucas will be with him in about ten minutes, they're not that far away, and he doesn't know we know that he's bluffing."

"Do we though?" Ruth murmured, softly. "If not, then Ros and Lucas..."

"Can take care of themselves." Sofia said firmly.

"You can't take that chance; you can't just let them walk into a trap." Ruth protested.

"There is no trap, there can't be one, he hasn't had the time."

"He has if he's known, or guessed the purpose of this entire scam, from the beginning, he didn't have much trouble figuring it out."

"It's your call Harry. Do you think the hunters have become the hunted?" Sofia asked, turning to him, knowing that they needed a decision now.

"We're about to find out." He muttered grimly calling Ros.

He gave them the address the trace on Salko's phone had given them before adding, "Be careful, both of you, Salko knows we traced the call, stay alert, no heroics, either of you. Good Luck."

With that he hung up, sealing their fate.

"What have you done Harry?" Ruth breathed, unable to stop herself.

"We'll soon find out." He replied darkly.

A/N: I don't know why but when I was writing this I felt as though it was coming across as 'they did this, then she said that and so they did this' I really hope that's not the case but if it is please let me know! Thank you all for your reviews so far, as ever, looking forward to your thoughts on this latest instalment.

I


	10. Head of Mirrors

**Chapter 10**

Head of Mirrors

"No heroics." Ros said in mock indignation as she pocketed her phone, "As if either of us would do anything of the sort."

Lucas smirked, as Ros made to input the address into the on-board GPS before realising that Lucas had already changed direction, "You recognise the address?" she asked, surprised, she had no idea where Salko was hiding.

"Yes, it's an abandoned industrial plant on the outskirts of London, we should be there in about ten minutes." He replied casually.

"And you know this how?"

"I remember seeing it on a map once, years ago when it was still in use." He shrugged, "It came up during an operation; the company went under, no-one bought over the land, it's been empty for years now." He explained matter-of-factly.

"I'd kill for your memory." Ros muttered, impressed against her will. All of the Spooks had better than average memories but Lucas' bordered on photographic.

"Not if you knew what else I remembered." He muttered darkly, pulling gratefully out of the oppressive city onto barren, empty roads.

They drove in companionable silence for almost ten minutes until Lucas broke it, "That's it, he's in there somewhere." He said grimly, nodding towards an enormous black stone building that was gazing down upon them, its melancholy windows looking like eyes that ravens had made a meal of.

"So that's what Hogwarts would have looked like if it had been set in Russia." Ros said tartly staring out at the oppressive maze of walls before them.

Lucas laughed softly before saying "Suits him, doesn't it."

"Easy Lucas." She cautioned as they pulled up outside, "Interrogations tend to work best when the other person is _alive._"

"Don't worry...His death would disappoint me, there are worse fates in this life than dying." He replied darkly, the effect of his words ruined as he loaded the gun in the glove box and stowed it securely at his hip.

They made their way into the building, drawing their weapons as a window smashed above them. Despite the fact it turned out to be a careless crow, dislodging loose panes of glass, neither of them put their guns away as they advanced on the abandoned warehouses. They cautiously made their way into the depths of the warehouse, Lucas shivering slightly as they were engulfed in the belly of the beast. As they reached its heart both of them jumped and swore, though in different languages, as the comms shrieked in the ears and they wrenched them out.

"Flying blind." Ros muttered, glancing at Lucas, "Do take care not to die on me now won't you."

"Well I wasn't too concerned about it before but if you insist." He smirked.

Eventually they reached the end of the interminable, black corridor where it split into two equally long corridors ending in large warehouses.

"I think they come together eventually." Lucas said, doubtfully squinting down to the left, trying to remember the plans of the building, it had never featured that heavily in the original operation they had considered it but had only skimmed briefly over the schematics at the time.

"Let's find out, scream if you run into bother." She said, striding purposefully off to the left down the corridor Lucas had been squinting at, leaving him to go right.

"No need, it's walking away from me." He grinned before setting off.

He continued down the long, narrow tunnel, the deserted building had developed the unsettling habit of amplifying even the smallest of sounds, there was no need for radios, a shout or scream would carry all over the plant.

As he entered the large storage room at the end, the atmosphere of the building changed considerably. The air was thick with dust, and lay upon him like a blanket, his breathing was not helped by the dense plastic sheets that had been strung from the ceiling, presenting him with a plastic wall before him, with only small pockets of respite between the sheets.

Swearing softly under his breath and cursing the claustrophobia that had plagued him since prison he forced his way into the room, pushing aside the first sheet and feeling his chest tighten as he realised he would be trapped within the suffocating maze for longer than he had originally anticipated. Stubbornly refusing to allow his head to get the better of him, he unwisely plunged into its depths.

Sound and light were both muffled and intensified in the enclosed plastic forest. The plastic sheets absorbed and deadened the soft sounds of his footsteps, however his brain overcompensated and transformed the most innocent noises and shapes into sinister shadows, enemies that crept up on him between the strangling sheets

...

Ros moved quietly away from Lucas, still grinning at his cheek. To say that the old building was eerie was like saying that Harry didn't mind the odd glass of Scotch. Ros had a reputation for being the Ice Queen of The Grid, and for good reason, it took a lot to unsettle her, but this place sent involuntary shivers up her spine. Lucas was right; it suited Salko like hookers suited Vegas.

She turned a corner and jumped as she found herself staring at her twin. A large mirror had been placed precariously against the wall opposite the entrance, forcing whoever came through it to confront their own reflection.

The room was on two levels with a thin, twisting set of iron stairs behind her leading the upper floor, both levels were filled with dusty mirrors, some covered in old, filthy sheets that may have began life as white but were not any longer. However there were more than enough that were uncovered to bounce the little light that managed to penetrate the grimy windows around her, magnifying it and making her feel faintly dizzy. She felt as though someone had locked her inside a giant glitter ball and it was not something she would have thanked them for.

She was about to move deeper into the room when a flash of movement was reflected in the top left hand corner of the mirror she was staring into. She turned and instinctively hit the floor, immediately ignoring the dark silhouette ahead of her in favour of avoiding the bullet that fractured the mirror behind her. She hissed as the razor-like shards rained down upon her, slicing at her exposed flesh with the ease of tiny scalpel blades.

...

Lucas started as he heard the unmistakeable bang of a gunshot off to his left. _Ros._ He had been dragging himself through the room under sufferance and regretting his pride, he was drenched in a cold sweat and was visibly trembling. Now however he ignored his own discomfort as he threw himself into the dense pit of sheets that began clawing at him, whipped into a frenzy around him as he desperately tried to escape their clutches.

He knew better than to shout for Ros, Salko may not know that there were two of them which gave them a distinct advantage, even if he did, he had no reason to give away his position when Salko could presume he was with Ros. While he was not prepared to start up a game of Marco Polo with her, he could not refrain from swearing continuously as he fought through the maze of sheets, venomously condemning the bad timing of his particularly vivid and brutal flashbacks that were taking pleasure in reminding him exactly _why _he was claustrophobic, in as vile a manner as possible.

Finally bursting free of the suffocating mass of sheets, hanging like the entrails of some foul demon behinf him, he stepped into the open, high ceiling, empty room before him, taking huge, grateful lungfulls of air, as though afraid he would never taste it again as he stumbled on, head swimming as he recovered from the flashbacks.

Normally he would have taken a moment to compose himself but this was not normal, as a second gunshot and the sound of breaking glass chose that particular opportunity to remind him.

Cursing his own weakness and blurred vision, he staggered towards the sounds. _Hall of Mirrors._ He thought with a jolt, being forcibly reminded of the old carnival attraction as he gasped its way through its likeness.

...

Ros was still crouched in the same position she had fallen, Salko was on the platform above her and she did not dare move until she knew where he was and therefore how much of the bottom level he could see from his vantage point. As far as she was concerned she was not injured, meaning that she had not been shot. The mirrors exploding around her had done some damage though, several cuts were now peppered over her exposed skin, some of which she knew, were deep.

Deciding that she could not sit here forever, she took a cautious step forwards. Her ears were ringing from the gunshots, magnified by the echoing expanse of empty space before them, and her eyes were feeling similarly thanks to the damned mirrors.

The gunshots had silenced themselves however, she thought that Salko could no longer see her and, for whatever reason, was choosing not to shoot out the mirrors, that was until someone grabbed her from behind, the barrel of a gun pressing into the small of her back as they expertly pinned her arms to her sides while covering her mouth.

Instinct took over and she began to struggle violently, like a fish pulled from the river, as she tried to position her gun at an angle that would hit the bastard, when he flipped her, deftly round to face him and pressed a finger to his lips.

_Lucas._

Now sure that she was not either going to scream, or shoot him, he cautiously released her and slid down the cool wall behind them to the floor, gently guiding her with one hand on her arm, she slowly sunk down and joined him on the frozen concrete beneath them.

It took her a second to notice that the grip on her upper arm was far tighter than it needed to be, but also that it was causing her to shake violently. She followed it up to his face and saw that his intense, deep blue eyes, that were usually blank and calm, were filled with a terror that she had rarely seen in them. His face was drawn, and chalk white, intensifying the dark, tormented horror of his eyes further.

If she did not know better she would presume that he had joined her in the warehouse from Russia, he looked like a shadow of the man she knew and that terrified her more than she would ever willingly admit.

He was the constant on The Grid for her. The one that, despite the John Bateman saga, she trusted the most. She knew that, no matter what, he would have her back and would follow any order she gave, without question. More than that though, she trusted his instincts, in a way he did not need her to tell him what she wanted him to do, they could read each other to the point that less cynical people would claim that they were psychically linked. Put bluntly, she needed him to get his shit together, fast.

"You OK?" she asked roughly, concerned.

He nodded without speaking, confirming her fears.

"Lucas what-" she began.

"Nothing." He said sharply, "I'm fine."

"Bullshit."

"Yes it is, but I'll deal with it." He snarled.

"What?" she began, but he cut her off, gripping her arm again, his hand a rock solid now, steadied by the sudden shot if adrenaline he had received as he pointed to the shadowy figure reflected in the mirror.

Immediately switching gear, she signalled for him to create a distraction she slid behind him and began moving around the figure, and began stealthily creeping up the stairs towards him, while Lucas kept him occupied from below.

Smirking and knowing what she had in mind, Lucas carefully began shooting out the mirrors causing the silver shards to rain down upon them like rough diamonds. In order to confuse Salko, Lucas was forced to shoot out mirrors dangerously close to Ros to make it difficult for him to tell where exactly she was.

Ignoring the shards of silver that were piercing her skin, Ros moved through the maze of mirrors towards Salko who was standing pressed against the railing that separated the two platforms.

She cautiously began to creep towards him, like a cheetah stalking an unsuspecting gazelle, under cover of the exploding mirrors that shattered around them. She paused a few feet from him, crouched behind a large mirror, watching. She could not simply run at him and hope for the best, the risk of one or both of them being shot was too great. Hindsight was a wonderful thing, as she discovered a second later, wishing that she had not hesitated, as he fired a shot at the ground below.

Lucas had stood and quickly darted out into the open to change his position, having run out of mirrors to hit at the angle he had been at and Salko had been more than ready from him.

Ros' heart thumped painfully in time with the shot that collided with something that sounded fair more like human flesh than a mirror or a wall. She heard the soft, unmistakeable sound of a body hitting the floor and then nothing the mirror's attacker having been silenced by Salko's gunshot.

Conveiniently forgetting about Harry's previous warning about heroics, she ran at Salko, hitting him across the back of the head with the gun in her hand, the satisfaction she got from hearing the sickening crunch of metal impacting skull, was the only thing that stopped her doing more damage. He crumpled to the ground at her feet, leaving her an unimpeded view from the balcony.

She hastily stepped over him, panting as she peered over the edge of the platform she could see Lucas' limp form lying almost peacefully amidst the carpet of broken glass that surrounded him.

"Lucas!"

The only answer was that of her own voice, reverberating around the walls as the cavernous room mockingly echoed her own, terrified cry, back at her.

A/N: Hopefully this came across as tense and suspenseful because if it didn't do that then this chapter probably didn't do much :) Thank you all for your reviews so far, if you have a minute, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.


	11. Confession Box

**Chapter 11**

Confession Box

"Lucas!" Ros had hastily bound and gagged Salko, attaching him to the railing as an extra precaution, although there was really no need, before descending on her fallen officer.

"Lucas?" she murmured, more softly now that she was crouched down beside him.

There was a large, shocking patch of scarlet blood soaking through his shirt at his shoulder. Taking a deep breath she took control of herself and the situation, her level headedness winning out over her unsteady heart as she decided that she couldn't do anything by having her heart listening to her head, never a good idea, as she had decided long ago.

Removing Lucas' shirt so she could get a better look at his wound she then began tearing it into strips, intending to use them as makeshift bandages. Their comms did not work and she could not get a message to Harry without leaving the building, something she refused to do while Lucas was like this. Sallko would keep for now and unless Lucas woke up, she was going to have fun getting the two of them out of the building on her own.

Now that she could see the wound in his shoulder she was glad to find a through-and-through, while this ultimately meant a bigger hole, it also meant that she did not have to worry about digging the bullet out and potentially doing more damage.

She carefully began to wind the strips of fabric around his shoulder to prevent him from losing anymore blood, as she put the final knots in her makeshift bandages, pulling the fabric as tightly as she could without ripping it, he groaned and tried to sit up.

"Easy." She said, warningly, having no intention of allowing him to undo the work she had just done and, frankly, still being pissed that he had been inconsiderate enough to get himself shot in the first place, she put a hand on his injured shoulder, forcing him to lie still as she finished up.

"What happened?" she managed to discern through a violent coughing fit.

She rolled her eyes and deadpanned, "What do you think? One of Santa Claus' reindeer gored you. "

"I see...And Santa?"

"On an enforced tea-break."

"Well he's a hard worker..." Lucas said, absently, before narrowing his eyes and adding, half-amused, half-exasperated, "What did Harry say about heroics?"

"I forget...Which is bloody lucky for you, you ungrateful-" she broke off at the satisfied smirk on his face and asked, "Can you make it back to the car?"

"Is that a question or a command."

"The latter." She said, flatly, "And you'll have to grit your teeth and help me with Salko."

"Wonderful."

They somehow managed to stagger back to the car where they then stuffed the unconscious Salko, unceremoniously back into the boot. By this point Lucas looked as though he had lost about a quarter of the blood in his body, judging by his complexion and slumped gratefully into the passenger seat.

Ros decided to task him with nothing more than staying conscious as she thrust a bottle of water she found in the driver's door at him, while she angrily ordered the phone to find a signal to allow her to call Harry.

Lucas found several sachets of sugar in the glove box, intended for long since cold cups of coffee and added them liberally to the water as Ros finally managed to get a hold of Harry.

"Ros! What happened are you both OK?"

"We'll live." She said grimly, smirking at Lucas who pulled a face to say _maybe_.

"Thank God. Salko?"

"We're providing him with first class transport back." She replied quaintly.

"Well done both of you."

"Listen, Harry, Lucas is injured, can you have back up meet us at the hospiteal to take custody of Salko? We'll-"

"Bring him in ourselves." Lucas cut in firmly.

"Lucas you-"

"I'm fine." He said, flatly.

"Lucas if Ros-" Harry began patiently, thinking that there must be something to it if she wanted to take him to a hospital first.

"It's just a scratch Harry I'll-"

"Scratch? It looks like the bloody Black Hole of Calcutta's opened up on your shoulder!" Ros snapped.

"As you said we'll live, and I believe that the Black Hole of Calcutta was a prison." He smirked.

"Don't play cute with me Lucas." Ros growled, tempted as she was to make him beg to be taken to a hospital to escape her, she would not let this go, "This isn't up for negotiation."

"Well it should be. If you think I'm going to jeopardise this entire operation just so you can hold my hand while a doctor kisses my shoulder better, then I'm not the one who should be hospitalised." He said forcefully, "Salko's too important to risk, we'll go to The Grid first, it'll hold til then."

Harry considered this for a moment as Ros seethed, "OK Lucas, Ros, bring them both back to The Grid, Salko is too important to risk losing."

"Fine, but if he drips blood all over your antique carpet don't be handing me the bill."

Harry hung up and Lucas looked sideways at Ros whose expression told him that his next words were probably not wise but he couldn't help himself, "You're going soft Ros Myers." He smirked, playfully.

"I'm not above putting another bullet in you delusional or not I assure you, and I'll make a better job of it than Sparky in the back." She hissed, feeling the corners of her mouth twitch involuntarily.

He decided he'd started now and that a little more couldn't hurt as he teased, "I'm not delusional at all, you're insisting we risk assets to have me checked over, and don't even get me started on what happened in that warehouse, I thought you were going to confess your undying love for me..."

A sharp, well-aimed slap to his injured shoulder warned him that he had gone too far, "I'll be confessing to something Lucas...A little more criminal than loving you." she muttered darkly, the effect ruined by the definite smile that was now playing around her lips.

The look on her face forced him to bite back the retort that was dancing on the tip of his tongue, sensing that he could probably push her too far and that she would find it altogether too easy to make whatever punishment she deemed suitable look like an accident and allowed them to slip into a comfortable silence as he sipped at the sugar water and carefully rearranged the bandages at his shoulder after noticing several spots of blood peeking through the dark material.

They had been quiet for a while, and the industrial plant was far behind them when she spoke again, "Lucas." She began, softly in a tone that announced that she was now being deadly serious, "What happened to you in that warehouse?"

Knowing full well what she meant but having no desire to discuss it he deflected the question lightly by saying, "I thought we had established that, I got shot."

"No." She said quietly, knowing his thoughts but pressing on all the same, "before that, after we split up, when you rejoined me in the house of mirrors room, I thought you'd just come back after spending another eight years in Russia."

He paused, struck by the irony of this before saying finally, knowing that she would not drop this without a fight, "It was nothing, flashbacks, I'm a little claustrophobic...I'm fine."

"Bullshit." She snapped, the only time she worried was when he insisted that he was 'fine' "You looked like you'd been confronted by the ghosts of prison's past. I know you Lucas, it takes more than flashbacks and nothing to set you off like that. What exactly do you mean by claustrophobia?"

"It means I'm not particularly fond of small spaces." He said with a flash of irritation, knowing that his wish of having her drop this was about as likely as canaries emerging from the bullet wound at his shoulder singing the Coronation Street theme.

"Don't you bloody patronize me Lucas!" she spat, flaring up as well, "I need to know I can trust you to keep your head in situations like that-"

"You can."

"Not if you lie to me." She said shortly before saying urgently, "Lucas what-"

"I need to know that I can trust you to understand that I can choose not to share every memory, every flashback, every minute detail of my past with you without having you question my loyalty." He said in an undertone, the softness that had returned seamlessly to his voice making the words more poignant that if he had screamed them at her through a megaphone.

Both of them were still, realising that they were too full of adrenaline and tense relief to have a conversation that they would not regret later. They had both overreacted and had been suitably chastised by the other.

"I'm sorry." He murmured, being the first to vocally acknowledge what they had both internally accepted.

"I'm sorry too, you're right, I don't have any right to presume that I can order you to allow me to intrude on your past."

"I would never say that you 'intrude' Ros." He said, quietly, "I just-"

"No, it's OK...I would feel the same in your position...It _was _Russia?"

"It's always Russia." He replied, bitterly, knowing exactly how limited his service experience was considering that, of what he had to draw on, three quarters of it had been spent in Russia.

They lapsed into silence for a long time before he said, impulsively, in a voice barely audible over the howling wind that had recently engulfed them, "They buried me alive..."

"They did what?" she whispered, hollowly, praying she had misheard.

"It was during the Sugar Horse interrogations. I'd been tortured for days already. They, dragged me outside, I was barely conscious to begin with but they knocked me out anyway." He had no idea why he was telling her this but now he found that he had began speaking, he could not stop, "When I woke up I was sealed in a glass coffin with nothing but a torch and a tape recorder..." he paused again there, but she sensed his uncertainty and the impulsiveness with which he was speaking and knew better than to interrupt him, "The tape." He stumbled again before taking a deep breath and forcing himself to continue, "The tape said that they would release me once I had given them information on Sugar Horse, they said that the torch would last for eight hours and then things would become _unpleasant._..I was in there for two days straight, after the eight hours, as promised..." he broke off, staring ruefully at his hands as he suppressed whatever flashbacks had plagued him in the warehouse, "After eight hours, they began to fill the box with water, I'd already gone through the water-boarding, 'unpleasant' wasn't the word I would have chosen..."

"God Lucas, I'm sorry." She breathed, marvelling at how well he managed to control himself, thinking of the small interrogation rooms favoured by MI-5, unpleasant for their visitors, unbearable for him. She also found memories of the time spent in the disused tunnels beneath London that they had been forced into during the Sugar Horse operation, making thier unwelcome way to the forefront of her mind and wondered how the Hell he had managed to keep his head.

"Needless to say, I've not been too fussed with small spaces since." He said, feeling the need to fill the gaping silence that had been left in the wake of his anecdote.

"How do you deal with it?" she asked, also speaking out of the need to say _something._

He laughed bitterly at that, "You just do...I was interrogated about Sugar Horse within the first few months of my imprisonment, I had another seven and a half years to learn how to cope...Everything moves at warp speed in prison, despite the fact that a day feels like a year, you have to learn to adapt, quickly, you can't do that, you won't belong, you don't belong and you won't last long."

"Dum spiro, spero." She said quietly, quoting the tattoo on his back as she nodded, though she knew that she could never understand. She was sorry she had asked now, wishing that she had kept her curiosity to herself and let him alone when it first became apparent that he did not want to discuss it. He seemed to know what she was thinking, an ability that often unsettled her more than she would admit , as he murmured softly,

"Thank you."

"For what?" she said laughing humourlessly.

"For being the world's worst counsellor." She snorted in spite of herself and he smiled as he said, "I could never talk to shrinks anyway, they could never _understand._"

"And you think I can?"

"No, " he said, choosing his words carefully now, "I know you can't...But you know that too, you can't understand what I've been through, but the same can be said for anyone, but you do understand me...You listen to help, not so you can scribble something deep and meaningless in Latin and collect a payslip at the end of it."

She smiled quietly at that, having a similar opinion of psychologists and thinking that he had summed up her feelings on the matter very well and said, "You're very welcome."

The remainder of their drive back to The Grid was spent in companionable silence as they were both suddenly hit by exhaustion like a freight train as the remnants of the adrenaline that had fuelled them evaporated.

The sugar water had worked wonders on Lucas, but despite his assurances to the contrary, his shoulder was in agony and he almost wished he'd allowed Ros to take him indulge her moment of matronly madness, allowing her to drop him off at a hospital; although he knew it would probably have come undone and she would have seen sense before they had arrived there his shoulder was protesting, loudly, against his decision. He was, therefore, intensely relieved to find officers waiting at Thames House to relieve them of Salko, meaning that all he had to do was remain upright.

Something he soon realised that was easier said than done as he found himself walking a little closer to Ros than she deemed necessary as he hobbled up the stairs.

A/N: Thanks for reading, hopefully Ros didn't come across as completely out of character here, she does tend to have a bit of a 'mama bear' streak in her if her team is threatened so I'm hoping that explains it :) I don't know, maybe it's just the onset of writer's block but I felt that this chapter was dragging, hopefully not but if it did let me know, if you enjoyed/didn't enjoy, I would love to know why, please leave a review if you have a moment.


	12. 21 Nones

**Chapter 12**

21 None

Lucas and Ros had barely had a chance to draw breath on the other side of the pods when Tariq was upon them.

"Briefing room." He told them, shortly adding to Lucas as they set off, "You look bloody awful."

"Cheers Tariq." He said, as Ros helpfully pointed out,

"If you like I could shoot you and we'll see how bright-eyed and bushy-tailed you are."

"No thanks." Tariq muttered, as Lucas smirked and sympathetically patted him on the shoulder.

"Lucas. Ros. Good to see you back." Harry said as they sank gratefully into chairs beside one another.

"The two of you look as though you swam here through broken glass." Ruth observed, concerned, "What happened?"

Lucas allowed Ros to speak for both of them as she concisely gave an account of what had happened in the warehouse.

"Lucas your shoulder, do you-"

"It can wait." He said convincingly, though he felt as though he was in danger of keeling over if he was asked to stand. "Ros patched me up at the warehouse, we have more pressing matters to deal with right now."

Ros, who had decided to let the man's damn shoulder fall off as punishment for his pig-headed stubbornness and said, "Indeed, and item number one atop said list is Artem Salko, what's our strategy with him?"

There was silence around the table. Everyone knew what their best line of attack against Salko was, but none of them wanted to say it.

"Someone needs to question him." Sofia said delicately, finally choosing to bite the bullet.

"And that someone will definitely not be you." Harry intervened, heading her off before she could continue.

"He won't talk to anyone else she said flatly, staring intently at him.

"Well you won't be talking him." He shot back firmly.

"Then everything up to this point has been a waste of time. You could offer to resurrect his sister and he still won't give you what you want."

"And what, pray tell, do you have that will make him confess all to you?" harry snapped, "You have about as much to offer him as we do."

"I can be very persuasive Harry."

"You can't Sofia, you're too close to this already."

"I'm fine."

"That's what worries me." He said paused sighing as he made a decision, "We've all been going at this for too long, we need a break. No-one will be speaking to Salko for a few hours anyway, so we have time to decide our next move while he recovers from Ros' mugging. Take this opportunity to get some sleep, we'll come back to this in a few hours."

Realising that they were being dismissed the team stood, Lucas swayed on the spot as the colour drained from his face and the only thing that stopped him crumpling to the floor was Ros' reflexes.

"_You _take the time to go to the bloody hospital." Harry told Lucas sharply, realising that Sofia's assurance of being fine was not the only one he should have questioned, shaking his head he muttered sourly, "You can stop off and pick up your bloody Oscar on the way back...Ros?"

"Yes." She said, already half-supporting, half-dragging Lucas to the exit.

"Sofia? A word please?" Harry said, quietly, gesturing towards his office as everyone began to slowly filter from the room.

Ruth and Tariq moved away from the others, both seeking the respite of a quiet corner on The Grid to try and make a dent in the sleep debt they were owed.

Sofia quietly closed the door on the others and dragged to chair a comfortable distance from the desk before settling herself in it. She watched Harry quietly, watching him as he seated himself behind the desk, she knew what was coming, she had been waiting for it since her arrival that morning.

"You know what this is about." It was not a question but she nodded all the same, however the question was not exactly what she had been anticipating, "How?"

She watched him silently for a moment, slightly thrown, he was not asking why, and there was a distinct hint of disgust in the shortened version of the full question that was implied, 'How could you bring yourself to do that?' and paused before replying, "People are often capable of more than you expect...You know the answer to that."

"I'm not so sure that I do. Every time I think I know you and your capabilities, you do something like this and I end up back at square one with more questions than I ever had answers."

"Well that should tell you _something_." He raised his eyebrows, "I like to keep you on your toes." She smirked easily.

The corners of his mouth twitched involuntarily, but she took the opportunity to change the tone of the conversation saying, "If you're expecting a blow-by-blow account of last night it's not going to happen." She told him flatly, "There was a reason I did it on my own time, I didn't and don't, intend on letting you play shrink for the sake of paperwork."

"You should let someone." He told her quietly.

"I learned to deal with it Harry. I don't need some idiot that thinks they can get inside my head because they've got a piece of paper that tells them they're qualified to, cell walls in Russia understand more than they do."

"You can't compare the two Sofia, whether or not a shrink has been through it, they know that rape isn't physical it's psychological. That means that unlike most violent crimes where the location and even to an extent the perpetrator don't have much of an effect on the outcome, the circumstances and situation of a sexual assault can change the aftermath of said attack. This is, therefore, completely different to the senseless violence your Russian prison walls know, and I don't think you're dealing with this as well as you claim." She watched him carefully, her face smooth and impassive as he continued, "Everything that happened to you in Russia was forced upon you, _nothing _was consensual, the assaults you endured were physically forced on you. This is a different situation entirely, this took brains not brawn, this time you felt forced into it for _reasons_. There was logic and reason, a conscious decision was made, by you, to go through with this. You can't tell me that you feel the same and that this hasn't affected you."

She hesitated, surprised by his instincts, particularly considering how devastatingly accurate they were. He had answered questions that she had sweated blood over the night before without being able to reach a conclusion, with apparent ease.

He may have complained that he had spent the last few weeks re-evaluating her with every decision that she made; but she sin turn had been constantly second-guessing his motives to every choice that he made also. It was not that they did not trust one another, something that was essential to allow them to _function _in their line of work, but they were both too paranoid to trust the other unconditionally.

"Did you ever doubt Salko?" she asked perceptively, picking up on the many U-turns Harry had performed regarding him in recent days.

"I doubt everyone Sofia." He replied evasively. She smiled, "Did you?" he asked.

"No. I knew what he wanted from the beginning. The rape was a test, he was never going to give us everything for that, big deal for me, Monday evening for him...He wanted to know how far we were willing to go, we had to prove to him that we were serious about this attack, which we are. If the US President is killed during these peace talks we'll end up with a situation worse than the one we're trying to prevent. Forgetting about the immediate effects of the collapse of the nuclear deal for a second, which would be disastrous in themselves; if the Americans got hold of the fact that we knew about the potential of an assassination attempt on their President and failed to stop it blood will be spilt. They won't hear the fact that we had an uncooperative informant, or that one of its officers allowed themselves to be raped by said informant to try and get information, they'll just hear the fact that the British Security Services knew about the threat to the life of one of the most influential men in the world and did nothing to stop it. At best we're incompetent, at worst we're involved. These talks are designed to stop the outbreak of a nuclear arms race between the world's leading powers, Russia knows as well as we do that their little Lighthouse trick has left them balancing on a knife edge as it is. And Salko knows as well as we do that if this attack goes ahead it will be catastrophic, not just for these peace talks but for peace in general."

"You're right, we need this information." Harry said, staring at her pensively, "Everything we do here is done behind closed doors and without public knowledge or consent. We make decisions that affect every man woman and child in this country; and they will never know about any of them. Usually that's a good thing,t his is one of the most rewardingly thankless jobs you can choose to do, none of us are in this profession to be universally adored or thanked every time we step outside our doors. Usually just being able to wake up in the morning and step outside itself is enough...If one of us were to die tomorrow, having given everything and then some to this country, receiving nothing in return, no-one would know, and no-one would care overmuch."

"Some things in life mean more than the number of zeroes at the end of a pay check or the number of people you've never met who'll remember your name when you're gone...If being deprived of everything teaches you anything, it's that we value the smaller things more than the extravagant luxuries people often take for granted. All that time in Russia, and the only thing I ever asked for was a cup of tea...That was it, no stretch limos with champagne on ice taking me to my villa on the white sandy beaches of Barbados, just tea. We all know that Harry...We don't need the public to know what we do, to know what we've sacrificed...It's better if they don't."

"Indeed. Ninety nine times out of a hundred I would agree with you; but sometimes there are things we go through, things that we sacrifice that cannot be ignored, that cannot go unrewarded or unpunished." He paused there, placing the key card he had been absent-mindedly playing with onto the table as he continued in exactly the same tone of voice, "Salko is being held in interrogation room 329, he's not due to be formally interviewed for the next four hours, but it's important that we do this right, as you say his information is vital to us..." He rose from his desk and left her sitting alone in the office on the pretext of checking something with a junior officer floating nervously just outside the door.

She watched him walk to the door, as he closed it softly behind him, her eyes darted back to the desk and lingered on the key card lying innocently on the desk in front of her. Though subtly presented, his meaning was perfectly clear, not or the first time, she was left thinking not what, but _why._

A/N: I'm beginning to worry that this is becoming predictable or worse still, dull, so please share your thoughts and let me know what you like or don't like about this.


	13. Interrogation Room 329

**Chapter 13**

Interrogation Room 329

Sofia paused outside interrogation room 329, thinking. _Over thinking. _Why had Harry given her that key card? Had she been stupid to take it, failing some sort of test? Were the cavalry about to descend upon her in all of Harry's disappointment? Or had he fully intended her to take it, and to use it as he knew she would? Had it purely been out of guilt, not only for what Salko had one to her in the last few days but also for the eight years of torture she had suffered at his hands in Russia? Was Harry trying to make amends for the wrongs he had committed against her by extension in the last few years? Or was it more than that? Was he allowing her to do this for his own benefit? Was she allowing Harry Pearce to manipulate her?

She decided she didn't care.

Slipping the key card into the reader by the door she eased it open and padded softly into the room. A small, dark concrete prison, the muffled windows adding to the illusion that they were either underground or underwater, neither giving a very pleasant impression.

The only decoration in the barren room was the steel table in the centre with the slim man, hands and feet bound by loose chains, sitting at it, the picture of tranquillity. For now...

"Well hello my little slut." He purred silkily in Russian, leaning towards her, a cruel smile playing about his lips, "I wasn't expecting the pleasure of your company for a while."

"You shouldn't have been expecting my company at all. You didn't think they would let me question me given our recent and ancient past?"

"And yet here you are."

"And yet here I am. Despite the fact that in about four hours you will be _officially _interrogated by representatives of the British Security Services who will probably make up for their lack of personality in the social niceties of these situations that I could just never be bothered with. In the meantime, well, how shall I put it, officially this doesn't exist, unofficially...I'll try and leave something for them to work with."

"You don't have the balls for it. You talk a good game but that's it. All that time in Russia you swore that if you had your chance you wouldn't take it, I wasn't worth it."

"You weren't that much was true...Time's change Artem and really the word of a delusional half-dead woman in a Russian prison really shouldn't be taken at face value. I've told you a lot of things over the years and probably the only thing I've ever said that didn't contain at least a fragment of a lie was my name. That's how we communicate Artem, secrets and lies, the only thing we ever know are the truths hidden within them."

"The best lies are coated in truth to make them easier to swallow." He said, softly, watching her closely as she circled the outside of the room.

"Exactly, and the sugar-coating on my earlier lie is that I won't torture you for information, how dull, so, for now, let's sit down and have a conversation like the civilised beings that we are."

He watched with fascination that only she had ever been able to produce in him as she did indeed calmly settle herself in the chair opposite him, "You are a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma." He told her softly, speaking as she made eye-contact with him.

This was also true. She had commanded in him a fascination that had never been acceptable in the first place that had mutated over time, eventually developing into the unhealthy obsession he now had for her. This was not fuelled by his desire for revenge and truth alone, far deeper and far more complex reasons existed to explain that. She had been something that he could connect with. Before he had used his intelligence and skills at reading people with an ease that meant they soon bored him. He exploited their pains and exhausted their secrets, they then became disposable tools with which he played simply to give himself something to do, they were a means to satisfy his sadistic cravings, nothing more.

She was different. She had presented a challenge, she was indeed, as he had put, a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, she held secrets deep within her that he had to work to extract. She was not like so many of the others that passed through the cold prison walls, transparent, as easy to read as the books in the expansive library whose halls he had frequently haunted. She had been capable of understanding what he said without having to use a dictionary to look up half of the words he quoted at her, could take the quotations he lovingly laid upon her ears and transform them into something even more beautiful by adding her own words.

She had given his life _meaning._ Not only did he finally have some kind of emotional investment in the secrets she held, a reason more powerful than money, to get the truth from her, she made him work for it. This had instantly drawn him to her, made her interesting, attractive desirable.

He no longer _wanted _her secrets, he _needed _her secrets. And they had to be hers; the same ones delivered by someone weak and undeserving would not satisfy his now insatiable hunger for her.

She smiled, recognising the quotation immediately also noticing the faint tangents that drew her back to their time in Russia "How appropriate. You never could figure me out could you Artem? You never thought we'd come to this because you didn't think I'd go through with it did you?"

"No I knew you would go through with it...I just would never know _why._"

"Speaking of why Artem, why are you here?" she said, smoothly deflecting the hidden question."

His eyes narrowed, sure she was tricking him as he spat, "You _know _why, you sent that blonde gorilla after me and gave her a gun so you could justify calling her human, she dragged me to you."

"Well, said well-armed gorilla had to find you first...Why did you make it so easy?"

"Animal magnetism." He purred with a cold smile, "We're drawn to each other Sofia, you can't deny it. I knew after you met with my initial demands they would think that you were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, I thought differently but what I _did _know that there wasn't anything you wouldn't do in order to keep playing games with me. They should have wrapped you up like a glass doll, you couldn't let that happen, you chose to manipulate them in order to spend more time with me, no more contact, no more games, no more fun."

"You're right, no more fun, I'm tired of playing games with you Artem." She said, her face betraying nothing of her internal feelings that had gone into overdrive, trying to determine if he was right.

"Liar." He hissed, softly, "You live for this. You need this to remind you why you bother allowing yourself to wake up every morning. You've been existing for three years Sofia, you crave a worthy opponent in this chess game we call life. You stop playing games with me, you stop playing."

She watched him carefully. He was right. They would never be able to sit down and have a frank discussion over tea; they would be more open during a poker game. He had hit the nail on the head; she needed him, needed _this_ just as much as he needed her. Her obsession for him was identical to the one he held for her. That put both of them in a potentially strong position, a position that only one of them could use to their advantage depending on how they played this.

If she was honest with herself, brutally honest, he was right. She loved this. She hungered for it just as much as he did; had looked forward to his visits more than the other senseless, brainless, sadistic prison guards. He had been brutal and had tortured her with more precision and to more devastating effect than the others but he had also connected with her.

He was also right in pointing out that, while Harry Pearce and whoever else decided to have a go at high school psychology and figure out the mental processes behind her relationship with Salko would inevitably arrive at the conclusion of Stockholm Syndrome, they would be wrong. This ran far deeper than a smiple bond forged between captor and victim from the mere infliction of pain. Their relationship, unstable as it was, was built on more than that.

She had found an equal in prison, not only on an intellectual level but on an intuitive one. He could read people, their motivations, processes, loves, hates, lives, as well as she could and that added an interesting dynamic to their relationship. It meant that they both had to work harder than studying the surface body language and words of their opponents, they now had to study what lay beneath the surface, the hidden meaning in everything said or done. It meant that their interrogations were never clear cut, simple, a game of cat and mouse, with more cloak and dagger than Ros Myers' wardrobe and more double bluffs than a poker match.

If she thought about it hard enough, it was a little too easy to say that he had given her a reason to live in prison. He had stopped her from taking her own life, and she in turn had done the same thing for him after the death of his sister. They were creatures created from the same test tube and had similar attributes, neither of them could bring themselves to take their own lives and leave behind an unsolved puzzle. They owed each other a debt, they needed each other, and neither of them had realised how much they had missed the games played in prison until they had stopped playing.

She considered him carefully before changing tact abruptly, realising that she may have revealed how much his words had unsettled her but deciding that she needed some way of getting back to the matter in hand and this was as good an opportunity as any, "The game we're playing seems to have me at a distinct disadvantage, we're playing by different rule...You know the history I share with Nicole, you _know _that I know something...I have nothing but your word to back up this attack."

"You trust my word Sofia, you slept with me based on it, you know I'm not lying."

She laughed softly "I didn't _know _I believed, there's a difference...I trusted you enough to give up my control to you, but never enough to give up my control over you. I know what this is worth Artem; I'm not giving it up on a hunch."

He considered this for a few moments before saying, "Russia found out about this attack a few weeks ago, they decided not to do anything about it, to let it play out. It may have been jeopardising their peace talks but they gained more from it than they lost. Politically, the American President is about as anti-Russian as you are, he risks plunging us back into the Cold War in order to indulge his own paranoia that's fanatic enough to rival Truman. He's managed to force the government into making some unpopular decisions in Russia, it's caused unrest with the people, the elections are coming up within a year, and the government can't afford to have him remaining in power for much longer, not if they want to. Just this once, they decided to turn a blind eye..."

"Keep talking." She growled as he fell silent.

"I'll continue when you start."

She shook her head, "That proves you know your Russian politics and why, if there was an attack, the Russians would ignore it, it explains how you _could _have come by this information but it doesn't prove you've actually come by anything. I want _details. _Proof."

"You must be joking."

"You must be concussed. You've fucked me that way once Salko, it's not happening again. You first or I swear to God I will put a bullet in my own skull, just for pleasure of the knowledge that you will never know what happened to her."

He watched her, he knew she was serious, but he also knew that she would not be so hasty as to kill either of them; he slowly shook his head, watching her for a reaction as he murmured,

"You cannot break me Sofia."

"I have no intention, but, as they say, it's not the winning that counts, it's the taking part so you'll forgive me for taking pleasure in trying." She said, getting to her feet and walking to the door.

"Where are you going?" he hissed, angrily, struggling against his bonds for the first time as he leaned towards her.

Turning to face him once more she said in a voice barely more than a whisper, "I would say I had hoped that it wouldn't come to this..." the lock slotted into place with a loud snap, with the finality of breaking bones, "But honestly...I think I'm going to enjoy this a little more than is healthy for our relationship."

A/N: This interrogation, both this chapter and next have been nigh on impossible to write, I could carpet my house with the crumpled bits of paper I've rejected in rewriting this so I hope it doesn't show and this is somewhat acceptable, for the sake of the rainforest, I hope it is :) I'm a little unsure about the digressions to explain the relationship between Sofia and Salko, particularly in prison, I'm hoping they made sense and seemed plausible but also hoped that they were woven into the interview in such a way that they felt somewhat natural and didn't just feel like padding. Anyway, enough of my ramblings, if I discuss everything that's bothered me with this your eyes will bleed so I'll leave it at that. Thank you all for the wonderful support! It pushes me to keep writing and sharing so my thanks to you all.


	14. Devil's In The Details

**Chapter 14**

Devil's in the Details

"Is the only criteria you need for flirting with someone breasts and a pulse?" Ros demanded as she and Lucas re-entered Thames House.

"I thought you would know that by now after all these years I've spent flirting with you." He replied instantly, smirking

"Keep talking and we'll see if you can't make it a date next time." Ros growled, though she turned her head a little so he could not see her faint smile.

After visiting the hospital they had both decided against going home and trying to get two hours of sleep, while they were both exhausted, neither of them could sleep and so they had decided to return to The Grid and catch up on what had happened in their absence, including a fuller version of Sofia's conversation with Salko during the attempt to trace him.

"What's happening?" Ros asked from her desk as Harry left his office and jumped at the sight of them.

Ignoring his irritation at Lucas' stubborn persistence at running himself into the ground for the adrenaline hit that came with a break in the operation he said, "Nothing. At the moment we're waiting for something to happen, calm before the storm."

"Where's Sofia?" Lucas asked, knowing perfectly well where she wasn't and needing to speak to her.

"Home." Harry said, shortly, "Everyone's catching up on sleep, as should you-"

Lucas swore softly under his breath and Ros sighed and explained bluntly to Harry, "You know, for being one of this services best spies, you're a shit liar Harry Pearce." He opened his mouth to protest and she clarified, "At least when it comes to your team."

He paused and decided that she was right; he couldn't have hoped to keep this from them, "She's in interrogation with Salko." He told them curtly.

Lucas swore again, more violently this time, as the coffee mug on his desk paid the ultimate price for Harry's deception and decision making when it sailed across the room its suicidal flight coming to an end with the wall on the other side of the room that it collided with.

"What the Hell is wrong with you Harry?" Lucas snarled, he had made this point half-heartedly earlier in the operation but it had been out of anger then, now it was coming from a genuine concern that was beginning to gnaw away at him.

"You know as well as I do that he won't speak to anyone else." Harry said flatly, "I had to make a choice, and I believe that this was the right one."

"Yes, the 'right' choice and the best way you could come up with of solving this problem was to lock her in a confined space with a man who has repeatedly torture her and who raped her less than twenty four hours ago and cross your fingers and hope for the best." Lucas spat, "Look, I don't know what the fuck has gone wrong in your head to make you think that that's a good idea...If you're guilty, see a shrink, if you're testing her, playing mind games, see a psychiatrist, if you're paranoid, see a psychologist, if you're just not getting any, see Ruth-"he broke off furiously as Harry blanched at this last suggestion and stormed from the office.

Despite herself Ros had been forced to turn her snort of laughter into a coughing fit after Lucas' solution for getting Harry laid but now pulled herself together and hurried after him.

"Where are you going?" she demanded, having a fairly good idea already.

"To fix this."

"Lucas, wait, maybe he has a point. What's done is done, if you go in there and she's managed to get him to open up and you ruin our only chance at him-"

"If it was you, if you were her, what would your first priority be? Getting information from him?"

"No. I'd kill the bastard." She said bluntly, seeing his point.

"How do you know which room they're in?" she asked, as the descended into the catacombs of interrogation rooms beneath Thames House and Lucas set off in a very set direction.

"I have good instincts." He replied, shortly, "Following that we'll just follow the screams..." he added with a trace of black humour.

They reached a row of rooms and Lucas' instincts turned out to be more than good when they found room 329 locked from the inside.

"Do you have a key card?" he asked, "It'll override the lock."

"Are you sure about this?" she murmured softly, "she deserves some kind of revenge."

"She can do whatever she wants with him when this is over; in the meantime we need him alive."

"You sound more like Harry everyday..." Ros muttered in his ear, fishing the key card out of her pocket, "You managed not to lose yourself in Russia, nothing is worth that Lucas." She told him, slipping the card into his hand.

"Speaking of Harry, can you check on him, make sure he isn't trying to sell uranium to terrorists."

"You're worried about him?"

"No...Mildly concerned...They day I start full out worrying about Harry Pearce is the day I pack up everyone and everything I love and make for Switzerland."

Ros nodded and watched as he slid the key card into the reader and made to open the door. She did not need him to ask her to leave, she knew better, however she turned as he softly called her name before entering the room, "Ros." She paused, "I won't."

He forced himself to turn away from her and cautiously entered the interrogation room. Sofia was pacing the shadows around the perimeter, like a tiger stalking its enclosure in a zoo, haunted, tormented. Salko was still bound in the chair and the table and was, miraculously, breathing, he had no idea what she had done to him, and had no desire to know, but he was chalk white and drenched in a cold sweat, though his eyes still gleamed maliciously from beneath his heavy, dark lids.

"Are you alright?"

"I'm fine."

God help me. "Has he given you anything?"

"Nothing."

"You bitch! That's a lie you-"he spat furiously before she cut him off,

"It's interesting to me that you want him to think you're a traitor, that you would sell your secrets to save yourself, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise, but sometimes the fallibility of human narcissism never ceases to amaze me...We agreed not to lie to each other in this room Artem, and I did not. I told you that I would not torture you or information, I didn't."

"What? I-"

"Told me nothing I didn't already know." She said smoothly, "I tortured you purely for my own entertainment...Revenge is best served enigmatically after all." She hissed, moving very close to him, forcing to make eye contact as a malevolent smirk played across her lips.

He began to swear violently under his breath as she pulled away from him, maniacal grin still firmly in place, irritated at how easily she had tricked him.

Sofia returned to the corner of the room, shrouding her face in shadow, but all Lucas needed to see was her silhouette nod to give him permission to continue. Now that he was here, and Salko was in a better condition than he had expected, he decided to talk to him as well, if of course, only for his own entertainment.

"Mr Salko, my name is Lucas North I am-"

"An MI-5 officer, charged with interrogating me properly. I already know so much about you Mr. North; you have spent time in a Russian prison, you enjoy reading, dedicated to your work, and that Russia has bred in you several neurotic tendencies."

"Very good." Lucas said, softly, allowing Salko his moment of indulgence before they began. "And you, in turn, controlling, narcissistic, a musician, the only indulgence you allow yourself, other than that deliberately restrictive in your enjoyment of life, the chains you force upon yourself in penance for your failure to protect your sister."

"He's good..." Salko hissed softly, "Not nearly as good as you my little slut, but good nonetheless."

"As you know," Lucas said, ignoring Salko's words and taking control of the conversation once more, "You have broken the deal we offered you, I'm giving you the opportunity to fix it..."

"I cannot fix what was never broken." She said silkily, staring arrogantly at Lucas.

"It was broken however; you received your 'payment' in full did you not?" Lucas said, unable to keep the traces of disgust from his voice.

"In full." He sneered, his eyes darting towards Sofia for the first time since Lucas had engaged him in conversation.

"We, on the other hand, were not paid in full." Lucas pointed out quietly.

"Really? Well perhaps I found your payment unsatisfactory, and to be quite honest with you Mr. North, I can't honestly say that I owe her anything..." he leaned forwards and whispered conspiratorially, "You see, Sofia likes it rough...That's what I gave her, can't say fairer than th-"

Lucas jumped to his feet so quickly that it took a moment for Sofia to register what he was doing as he slammed Salko onto the table, causing a fountain of blood to spurt from his nose that impacted the hard steel with a sickening crunch.

Lucas stepped away from him, rolling his injured shoulder and wincing as it protested to the sudden strain he had put it under, he rarely lost his temper like this and Sofia had not seen him lose control like this,

"Lucas." She murmured softly, turning to him. His face was impassive once more, his expression neutral as he turned back to Salko who spat,

"If you thought that one night with your charming little slut was going to buy you my secrets, you were very much mistaken Mr. North."

"If you think I wouldn't put a bullet in you and laugh as you bled to death then you are very much mistaken." Lucas replied softly,

"You've had your fun Artem...Start talking."

"I've already told you everything I know Sofia." He smirked eyes narrowed,

"You better hope to God that's a lie Artem...You wouldn't have sold everything to me in exchange for sex, a hooker's far easier, stop bullshitting me." She hissed, eyes narrowed.

"I'm not so sure I'm in the mood."

"Maybe this will improve it, one way or the other the nice interrogation officers are coming for you in less than an hour, they won't be making you an offer anywhere near mine. In less than an hour the last chance you'll get at the truth will walk out of those doors and you'll never know. Whatever happens here, you won't see me again Artem, no more games..."

"More lies Sofia." He hissed,

"It's not. Officially, this interview never took place, no authorisation, no paper trail, no nothing." Lucas said, for a man who had come close to murdering the repulsive creature opposite him he was remarkably calm. "Either you die, you're imprisoned here, or you're imprisoned in Russia, Sofia doesn't factor into any of those outcomes."

"I will tell you...But only after you tell me about Nicole." He said softly,

"No." Sofia said, flatly.

"Then no deal-"he began

"You're not in a position to negotiate Salko." She hissed, "This is the only thing I do, or ever will have over you, I am not giving it to a man who considered an appropriate exchange giving me 'the American President is being targeted' in exchange for rape. I will not let you fuck me twice Artem."

"I need to know Sofia...I need to know that you will tell me, I've held onto this for too long, I need to know...For her."

"Bullshit." She hissed, Lucas and Salko both stared at her in shock, "Don't give me you want to know 'for her', don't lie to me, this stopped being about her years ago you selfish bastard." She knew she was taking a risk that could seriously backfire on her but if she did not she risked losing everything.

"Everything I have done, I have done for her." He said in a deadly whisper that made her blood run cold.

"No you haven't." She breathed, flatly, deciding if she was doing this she may as well do it right and continuing before he could interrupt "You should have...She had more brains, more backbone, more reason to live than either of us, and yet here we are mocking her memory to serve our own selfish ends. You should have wanted to know why a beautiful, talented young woman with her whole life in front of her died, in filth, at the hands of those who saw her as nothing more than a pretty object. You should have hunted for the knowledge of what she had sacrificed, and why. You should have tried harder to find out that she became involved in an undercover operation against her own country as an asset hidden in an extremist Russian group. You should have died trying to find out why she did. She allowed herself to beaten and raped by those monsters she had called friends rather than blow my cover. You should have known that she gave her life for me and for a cause that you never knew and will never understand. You should have done everything you've done for her because she deserved more than what you have deigned to do for her. So you should fucking tell me what you know because she should be worth more than this, you should have convinced the truth from me ten years ago, because if you had done everything for her, I wouldn't still be holding onto this information for all this time so you could play cat and mouse and torture me at her expense. This is your last chance Salko..."

"The attack will take place in three days time and the Kieran Castle Estate, outside London, a nice open area, perfect for their plan. A sniper, quick and clean, they have people on the inside to make sure the sniper has a clear shot." The voice he spoke in was flat and emotionless, almost matter-of-fact, but his eyes burned in their sockets, staring at her in hatred.

"Which country is ordering the hit?" Lucas asked quietly, as Sofia recovered her composure from the corner.

"None of them." Salko said cryptically, "Russia knows but will do nothing, they want the President out of the way, this is the best they could have hoped for. This is being carried out by a mixed extremist group called 'Hiroshima' they have members from several different countries and are acting on the behalf of no-one but themselves. Their hearts are stuck in the Cold War but their heads are fully aware of current politics. They know how delicate the relationships are between the nations in these talks, they know how paranoid and mistrustful everyone is. They know as well as we do what the repercussions of the President's death will mean for world peace and politics, that's the idea. His death is just the beginning, they want him gone for personal feelings, but mainly he's just the match their using to ignite the pool of petrol we're all drowning in."

"Why do they want this now? What do they think the specific repercussions will be?"

"These fanatics, believe that the only way to diffuse the world tension is to bring it to the brink, to begin a nuclear war between the major powers, which these talks have so conveniently brought together. They think that it will always come to war, that no amount of peace talks and emergency summits will prevent, they want to start it now while we are all on a fairly level playing field before weapons become more advanced."

"What did you say this group was called? Lighthouse?" Sofia spat, not believing that the only thing the Russians were doing was turning the other cheek.

"Lighthouse was a highly sophisticated network, built up for over twenty years, designed to create a controlled war, this will unleash unfettered madness."

"We'll agree to disagree on the sanity of the motivations of the Lighthouse organisation." Lucas said brusquely, knowing that time was not on their side, "They can't expect this to work."

"It doesn't matter if it works in the way they intend. The point is, they intend to assassinate the American President on British soil, and whether or not it leads to all out war, it will destroy these peace talks, and any future ones that may have been at the very least. And you both know that in actual fact, with the world as it is, a nuclear war may not be the craziest suggestion at all."

"How well prepared are they?"

"Very, they have friends in high places and they're completely insane. Insane people are often paranoid, they'll have closed all the loopholes, this won't just fall apart because you know about it. More than that though, they're impressionable, unpredictable, they're not being backed by any larger operation, which means that they're potentially under-equipped, but it also means that they can't be called off, they have only themselves to answer to and that makes them even more dangerous."

"And Russia is backing this?" Lucas breathed in disbelief.

"No, Russia is ignoring this. They believe that the reward of having the President removed outweighs the risks that the fallout poses to them, they're probably right. If they know this is coming, they can avoid most of the political backlash from this and will probably be able to delicately remove themselves from whatever horror follows. You on the other hand will not be so fortunate."

"Who is it Artem, we need names, their assassin, the insiders."

"I don't know."

"Don't start-"

"I'm not." He spat irritably, "I have nothing to gain from keeping something as insignificant as that for you anymore, this was an all in or nothing bet, you know which one I took. I can't tell you what none of my sources have bothered to find out. It doesn't matter to us if it's Tom, Dick or Harry who kills him, as long as someone does. Besides, the less they know the more deniable they are, and as you have so aptly pointed out, the devil's in the details."

"OK...OK, so this group want to take out the President because...Because they're nuts and they think it will spark a nuclear war, something that they've decided is in the best interests of everyone. What we don't know is who it is exactly, we just know it will happen on the Kieran Estate...You're sure about that?"

"Yes. It's the only location that's not city locked, easier access and less chance of them being discovered by some unsuspecting civilian. That is everything I know now, Nicole."

"Come on Artem...You know as well as I do I never knew anything about her...It just provided you with the excuse you needed to keep playing cat and mouse."

"You liar!" he screamed, "You know you bitch, you know!"

"I never knew anything! They threw me in at the deep end in Russia and they never gave me the tools to fish myself out when you came hunting. I've spent the last three years trying to answer the question you tormented me with for eight years, because the only thing worse than your torture was not knowing what the fuck I had done to deserve it. You didn't honestly believe that I would've held on something like this for over a decade because I could, because I was waiting for a moment like this...If I had known I would have told you and I have absolutely no qualms about admitting that."

"You bitch, you filthy, lying whore..."

He had dissolved into nothing, pale and green as tears streamed uncontrollably from his eyes, looking so pathetic, that she almost pitied him, before the memories of her imprisonment in Russia and the look on his face the night before reminded her why she didn't.

She walked to the door and turned saying coldly, "The nice men from the FSB will be along to pick you up in the morning, I take it you have nothing with which to appease the officers that are coming down here to officially interrogate you in ten minutes?"

"You, you can't give me to them, I gave you what you wanted and you, you lied to me, you used me, you used my Nicole, you can't give me to them now."

"Oh but I can, I have everything I need from you, you're no longer of use to me Artem, I don't have a habit of holding on to things that are broken beyond repair...You give me one good reason why not."

"Night stalker."

She slowly turned back to face him, "You've been lying to me Artem...How do you know about that?"

"I haven't lied...If you think it has something to do with this and that's why I know then you're wrong...It's much bigger than you could ever imagine."

She paused, watching him. Her curiosity piqued, the answer she had been searching for for so long, and he could have it. Her gaze hardened as she leaned in closer to him and whispered, "I told you before Artem...I don't need you anymore."

She turned and left the room as he stared after her, only know understanding what his failure to play her had resulted in.

A/N: As I've said this chapter was damn near impossible to write, hopefully everything played out alright and didn't require any huge leaps or suspension of belief, as always, thank you all for the reviews! Please review if you can :)


	15. False Dilemmas

**Chapter 15**

False Dilemmas

Lucas hurried after Sofia as she left the interrogation room and caught her by the arm as he reached her halfway up the corridor.

"Why did you do that?" he demanded, roughly, forcing her to face him.

"Do what?" she snapped, jerking her arm away from him, but he refused to let her walk away from this saying,

"We're handing him over to the FSB now are we?"

"Apparently."

"He could have been a valuable asset Sofia, you know that."

"No I don't and no he couldn't" she snarled, flatly, "We could never have trusted him and I apologise for not wanting to put out every time a Russian diplomat sneezed on British soil." She snarled, succeeding in freeing herself, however she resisted walking away as he said,

"It sounded as though there was more to it was more to it than sniffly politicians..." she knew what was coming and turned to walk away, hoping that he would let it go. Stubbornness had always been a character flaw in Lucas. "What is Night Stalker?"

She froze, eyes closed, halted by the words she had hoped he would not say.

"I can't Lucas." She whispered before continuing to walk away from him.

Those three words concerned him more than anything else she could have said. _Nothing_ was classified between them; they trusted one another and neither denied the other anything. It was out of vulnerability more than anything else. They _needed _to trust the other, to prove to themselves that Russia had not entirely broken them and left them devoid of any faith in humanity. In their business if you couldn't trust, you wouldn't survive.

_What the Hell are you involved in Sofia?_

Lucas emerged from the sunken maze of tunnels back onto The Grid his eyes darted to Sofia but it was Ros that he turned to.

All of the spooks had a talent for compartmentalizing their lives, completely separating that various aspects, so much so that several were heard to complain of forcing themselves to develop multiple personality disorder. He would deal with Sofia later for now he had other things to deal with, _gone but not forgotten._

"Harry's called the others, briefing in twenty minutes." She told him quietly, not needing him to ask, "Can we trust him?" she murmured.

Lucas, who was currently having serious doubts as to whether or not he could trust _her_ shrugged and said, "We have to."

Twenty minutes later everyone else had filtered back onto The Grid. Tariq had mercifully brought them all coffee, knowing full well that 'rest' would not have been high on everyone's list of priorities. They slowly made their way into the briefing room as Ros called them over, as they entered it, Sofia brushed past Harry, declining the seat beside him in favour for one further down the table, opposite Ros and Lucas.

"What's happening?" Ruth asked, concerned, "We weren't supposed to have been back for another few hours yet."

"We wake you from your beauty sleep Ruth?" Ros asked tartly, "Suck it up you've had more than most of us." Ros snapped, having had no sleep for almost two days.

"That's not what I-"Ruth began,

"I know Ruth." Harry said, tiredly, how he had missed playing referee between these two, "Salko proved to be a little more forthcoming than we originally anticipated."

"Forthcoming? How much has he given us?"

"Everything." It was Sofia who answered, to general shock.

"You made her-"Ruth began in disbelief, turning accusingly to Harry,

"Get off your high horse Ruth, what's done is done and none of it under sufferance."

"Take it easy..." Lucas muttered, gently placing a placating hand on her side, the friendly gesture carefully concealed beneath the table.

Sofia's eyes darted between the two women as they glared at each other across the table, as Harry all but began banging his head off it and she smoothly intervened into the silent argument,

"Salko's given us details about the attack on the President which is due to take place in four days, third day of the talks by which point everyone will have spent ninety percent of the time dissecting the others' lunch choices and deducing their planning a nuclear attack because one of the body guards doesn't like lettuce..."

"Out of interest, why has the President decided to personally become involved from the outset, it's just proved to be a security threat, why are they not doing what the usually do, all of the negotiating behind closed doors, wheel him out to sign things and pose for the cameras, then lock him in the safe again?"

"Ah you've hit that speed bump that all politicians struggle with, when it comes to security versus power, they'll always pick power." Lucas began, "All of the leaders are attending, they're using the talks as a publicity stunt, the elections are all falling around the same time and every nation's leader is keen to make themselves look like peacemakers in these troubled times." He explained.

"So cynical." Ros said ironically, this was not lost on him and he gave her a sideways look of disbelief as she smirked and continued, "Other than them being media whores-"

"I.e. politicians..." Harry muttered, not so privately agreeing with Lucas,

"It also builds some international bridges, begin the talks in good faith, it offers up some kind of trust between the delegations, shows that they're serious about peace if they're willing to send out their President in person, our Prime Minister's attending for the same reasons."

"Who personality swapped the two of you?" Tariq demanded, smirking and knowing he was pushing his luck "Lucas being pessimistic I can just about handle, Ros being optimistic, dear lord prepare for the apocalypse."

"We may have to, clearly no-one spared a thought for the poor security services involved in these talks since we now have the wonderful task of protecting seven of the most influential people in politics." Harry broke in grimly as Ros glowered at Tariq making him shrink back in his chair.

"And what _exactly _are we protecting them from?" Ros asked, consenting to stop irradiating Tariq with her gaze and refocusing them, sensing that her team were exhausted and in need of several strong coffees as their attention span being dangerously low, except of course for Ruth. As ever, bloody Juliet was hanging on Romeo's every word...

"Salko's told us that an extremist group called 'Hiroshima' is targeting the President. As far as he knows they're doing this of their own volition, mixed nationalities, they're not being manipulated by any specific country. The irony is that they depend on the nations involved believing that that's exactly the case, they need them arguing amongst themselves as their main aim is not to assassinate the President, but to exploit the political fallout and paranoia that follows."

"What do they expect this to lead to?" Ruth asked, incredulously,

"War." Lucas supplied bluntly.

"They believe that the world is riding on a one-way ticket to nuclear war, they want to get it over with sooner rather than later." Sofia added matter-of-factly.

"They can't seriously believe they can cause a nuclear war?" Ruth said in disbelief.

"Why not?" Ros murmured, "If it was us, if someone murdered our Prime Minister during high profile, sensitive nuclear peace talks, with the whole world watching, how would we interpret it?"

"We wouldn't have any choice but to consider it an act of war." Ruth murmured, realising how this group could force the world into their bigger picture of how it should look, "Whoever these people decide to blame for their attack, whoever they claim is backing them, America won't have any choice but to openly declare war on them, everyone else will be swallowed up in alliances and crossfire."

"I forget when the last time we prevented a worldwide nuclear catastrophe was?"

"If you follow that up with 'I'm getting too old for this' I will not be responsible for my actions." Ros told him flatly, earning her several tired smirks from her team members.

"What are our options?" Sofia asked no-one in particular as Harry glared good-naturedly at Ros.

"Warn the Americans tell them that we know about the assassination attempt, no President, no assassination." Ruth suggested,

"No President, no peace talks. The other nations involved will want to know why the American's have pulled out their President; they're all too paranoid to accept a forged sick note signed by his mother. They'll think that we're keeping information from them and God knows what conclusions they'll jump to but none of them will be conducive to a successful nuclear deal." Lucas said flatly.

"Can we get to this group on time? Take them out before the attack?" Tariq suggested, hopefully.

"I doubt it." Ros said with her usual brutal tact, "From what Lucas and Sofia have said, they're too well prepared and intelligent. Unlike most of the idiotic extremist groups out there, they're not intent on shoving their plans for world domination down our throats using the internet and cheap recording equipment, they're focussing on the bigger picture before their own selfish beliefs and that makes them dangerous and unpredictable. They haven't gone looking for media attention, they're planning an assassination on the President, they don't need to, but it makes it difficult for us to trace them in the meantime."

"That said, even if we have a back-up, I still want to know everything about this group, Ruth?"

"I'll do my best, but Ros is right, they're careful, there haven't been any mutterings about this on the usual places online, they'll be difficult to find and as you say, unpredictable, it'll be hard to tell exactly what they're planning until we're much closer..."

"It's weird, it's almost as though, if we didn't know about this attack...We wouldn't..." Tariq muttered, tentatively speaking what had flashed through most of their minds.

"That's what makes them dangerous, and what would have made them successful." Sofia said, softly, not rising to the obvious bait that Salko had been lying to them, that she had been played by him. "They're not going in at this all guns blazing, they're using intelligence, if anyone finds out about their plans they're ruined. They know what they're doing, they're alone and isolated, and they haven't gone hunting for public support and glory, but they're prepared, that could be their greatest strength."

"What if we use that against them?" Sofia said, softly, "Could we go about changing the location at the last minute? Catching them off-guard? Salko's right, the only location that really lends itself to this kind of attack is the Kieran Estate, the others, while not impossible, make it far easier for us to intervene if the worst comes to the worst."

Ruth shook her head, "We can't completely change the location, it affects too many other things and the North Korean's at least will get suspicious, they might even pull out, we can't just expect them to accept a sudden change of plans. Even if they don't pull out completely, they'll start asking questions and creating a fuss we don't need. If we were going to do that, it would have to be kept quiet and the North Koreans won't."

"There could still be something to your theory though Ros, we might not necessarily have to completely change the location..." Lucas muttered, he had been quiet for some time and Ros could almost hear his brain picking over everything that had been said, trying to find an elegant solution, beside her.

"What, you want them to have a secret picnic in the boathouse?" Ros snapped, irritably, fast losing patience with the Olympic _dithering _that was going on around the table wishing that someone would just have the balls to stand up and come up with something that might actually work.

"Not exactly." Lucas said, patiently, "There must be a room somewhere in that Estate that doesn't lend itself to a sniper attack. It would still accomplish what you're suggesting; it takes more preparation than handing someone a gun, sticking them on a roof, telling them to pull the trigger and keeping their fingers crossed. We could come up with a legitimate reason for not using the drawing room as well."

"There might be someone in that." Harry muttered, considering this as Ros was pacified by someone finally growing a pair and a brain at last, "We would need to get inside and have a look around, I'm not taking any risks just using floor plans."

"Easier said than done." Tariq said, "That estate's been completely locked down for the last four says in preparation for these talks, no-one in, no-one out you won't just be able to flash some ID and ask to check the gas meter."

"Well I love a challenge." Ros said, who was not about to let some officious rich prick who happened to have a gun stop her when they had finally formulated something that might qualify as a plan.

"Good, you and Lucas can go and have a scout around tomorrow."

"Try not to get shot this time won't you." Ros said bluntly, making Lucas smirk and Ruth wince.

"You're concern is truly touching."

"While they're doing that, I want feeds from every camera they have on that estate Tariq," Harry said, also sensing that there might be something in Lucas' suggestion and ignoring him and Ros as he steam-rollered on, "Any other ways you can find of getting eyes and ears inside that building, do it, immoral, illegal, damn right suicidal, I don't care, I want them all."

"You ever worry about professional suicide?" Sofia enquired.

"Not while I'm committing it." He replied, the corners of his mouth twitching into what most people would call a smile, "Sofia, we are going to see the Home Secretary, fill him in on what's happening and get clearance to seed MI-5 officers into the delegations."

"Congratulations, you're Harry's official political buffer." Ros told her with a smirk, "The two of you can get back to reminiscing about the beauty of the Scottish countryside."

Sofia grinned and bit back the retort concerning Ros and Lucas playing happy families in the grand house.

"That's the plan, but it can wait until tomorrow, we have time now and I want you all at your best." He said, sensing that Tariq's drooping eyelids were attempting to speak for the exhaustion of his entire section, "Go home, get a decent night's sleep, I want you all back on The Grid, well rested, first thing."

Harry watched from his office as his exhausted section obeyed his orders, some with open relief, some with stubborn determination, only their acceptance of his instruction betraying their need for sleep, as they gathered their things and filtered from the building, heading home, gratefully leaving their professional problems at the door and picking up the personal ones that would follow them home.

Harry gratefully poured himself a healthy glass of Scotch, becoming miraculously impervious to Ruth's admonishments about the damage he was doing to his poor liver and the look on his doctors face if he ever attended his appointments to find out his blood pressure, as he allowed the soothing liquid to calm his overworked conscience.

Feeling something in his shirt pocket he removed it and balanced it between his fingers on the table as he took another sip of the numbing, non-judgemental liquor, smirking to himself as he began rolling the key card Sofia had slipped back into his pocket between his fingers.

A/N: Thank you for reading and reviewing :)


	16. Trapped Doors

**Chapter 16**

Trapped Doors

"When Tariq said this wouldn't be easy I didn't think he meant it would be suicidal." Lucas told Ros irritably as they wandered up the steep face of a lonely hill.

"I did say I loved a challenge..." Ros said, though she privately agreed with him.

"Next time, remind me to let you love it alone..."

They climbed over the top of the hill; they're burning calves relieved at finally reaching the summit and paused to examine the view. From their vantage point they could see the estate, a shapely blob on the horizon, the grand building looked quiet and deserted from a distance and seemed to be the dictionary definition of tranquillity. However they both knew better.

To their right was a large expanse of dense forest, bordered by a ferocious river that had forced them to ascend Pollyanna's version of Mount Everest, it was both their entrance and their escape route.

As it turned out, Tariq had not been exaggerating about the security at the Kieran estate, cameras everywhere, continually scanning every square inch of the large building, over fifty armed security guards at entrances and exits as well as being spread out over the house and grounds in regular patrols. It had soon become apparent that conventional methods were not going to get them in and they had been forced to get creative in order to get inside, hence the reason that Ros and Lucas were currently skulking outside the forest, over a mile from the building they wanted to be in.

"You remember where you're going, or do I need to direct you?" Ruth's voice asked, concerned, in Ros' ear.

"I don't, but the human sat-nav does, stop fussing Ruth we're fine." She replied shortly before squinting at Lucas and saying, "Tell me you remember?"

"And if I say no?"

"I'll give you a bloody good reason to remember."

He smirked and led them into the forest, methodically marking trees with a small pocket knife and a piece of chalk, occasionally closing his eyes as they went.

"What's your problem with Ruth?" he asked, as they navigated through the dense, oppressive trees.

Ros considered this irritably for a few moments before consenting to say, "She just..._irritates_ me."

"God help me if that's all it takes for you to bite someone's head off every time they open their mouths."

"I don't have a problem with the fact that it's her opening her mouth, I have a problem with what comes out of it, bloody patronising..."

"She's good at what she does Ros-"

"I never said she wasn't-"

"That's the problem, you don't have to say anything for it to come across like that, you should ease up on her a little."

"Doesn't take much for you all to jump aboard the S.S Evershed does it?" she snapped,

"It's safer there than on the battleship Myers." He told her with a grimace, "Look, I'm not asking you to marry her; just don't jump down her throat every ten seconds."

"You know Harry did that." She said, evasively, changing the subject,

"What?"

"Asked her to marry him."

"About time..."

"She said no."

"Doesn't surprise me, it would have been too...I don't know too,"

"Too perfect for the tragic little Romeo and Juliet portrait they've been busy painting."

"He deserves to be happy Ros...They both do..."

"That's the trouble with Juliet, she gets what she wants and they both end up dead."

Lucas rolled his eyes and shook his head, giving her up as a lost cause for the moment, concentrating on their surroundings again, when he suddenly stopped in the centre of a large clearing causing Ros to walk into him, snarling. This did nothing to improve her mood and sensing that his head was in imminent danger of being torn off he said,

"We're here."

"Really? We've reached our destination? Because this looks like every other bloody clearing we've walked through in the last forty minutes, God rest your soul if I have to call Ruth and tell her we're lost, what makes you so sure?"

"The thing you're standing on." He replied, mildly.

Snarling she reached down and cleared away the dense layer of leaves covering the thick, well concealed door, she gave the small, ornate brass ring a sharp tug, lifting up a trap door to reveal a set of rough stone steps descending ominously into the belly of the earth.

"You sure about this?" she murmured quietly, feeling a little claustrophobic herself.

"You fancy directing yourself down there without the help of your human sat-nav?" he teased, gently, concealing the flash of irritation at her sudden concern, wishing he had held his tongue about his burial in Russia.

"How hard can it be?" she said, cautiously shining a torch down into the gloom, they could both see that the path split almost immediately, as soon as the stairs hit level ground, "All roads lead to Rome..." she muttered, uncertainly, fearing for his sanity in the enclosed warren beneath them.

"I wouldn't be so sure of that...There's a maze of tunnels down there, they may all start from the same place but they all connect together in some way, think of a rabbit's version of the London Underground without the helpful maps, not somewhere you want to go for a casual wander..." he told her, defiance shining in his intense eyes, though his tone was completely neutral as he continued, "We should check in with The Grid before we go, our comms won't work underground, we'll be off the radar for a couple of hours."

Not sure which she was more irritated about, his imprisonment in Russia, or the damn pig-headed stubbornness it had bred within him, she accepted defeat and angrily called The Grid,

"Tariq, we found the entrance-"she began,

"Really?" he asked impressed,

"You're not inspiring me here Tariq." She said, warningly, "Are you sure that if we make it to the entrance you can get us inside?"

"Provided that nothing unfortunate happens to your tour guide and you make it to the house, I can get you in. There are patrols that move past your exit but they're predictable enough for us to get around."

"Wonderful." She said, drily, hanging up.

Lucas was quietly recreating the plans they were basing their efforts on with the chalk on a large flat stone lodged in the earth behind them.

"Are you sure about this or should we start drawing straws to decide who eats who now?"

In response he removed his ear piece and descended into the cramped tunnel with a small smile, forcing her to follow.

They had been walking along the path for about twenty minutes, it was fortunately about seven feet high, which meant that it comfortably accommodated both of them when Ros said, "To be honest, I never expected this to exist in the first place."

"Why not?"

"Just seems too...I don't know, too James Bond."

Lucas chuckled, "Not at all, paranoia isn't a modern invention; these tunnels have been cropping up in old country houses and churches across Britain, put in place either by criminals, or wealthy owners with too much money and no cure for greed and insanity for hundreds of years. The practice is actually older than that, similar tunnels have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, to trap potential robbers. There are more modern examples too, the Cu Chi tunnels were used by guerrilla fighters during the Vietnam War as supply routes and hideouts for the rebels involved in the Tet Offensive in the capital..."

"It must be nice to know the answer to _every _little thing." Ros said, as the tunnels narrowed ahead, making her feel as though they were being squeezed through the blood vessels of some strange beast.

"There were dozens of them in the house I grew up in." He shrugged, "I was curious."

They continued down the tunnel, Lucas pausing for a fraction of a second wherever the tunnel split, pausing before choosing the branch of the catacombs and moving down with a confidence that ensured Ros didn't complain about his minor hesitations.

They were both beginning to tire of the tunnels. The air around them was stale and heavy and they both longed for fresh air in the deadening passages, something, anything, other than the suffocating monotony of their underground maze.

When they reached a large chamber that branched off into four identical tunnels Lucas paused, and wordlessly handed her a bottle of water as he closed his eyes and began murmuring to himself, scratching on the wall of the cavern with the chalk he had been dragging along the wall to mark their progress.

As she took a grateful drink she watched him carefully out of the corner of her eye, he was pale and clammy, not that she could blame him considering, but also looked concerned, whether from concentration or claustrophobia, she could not tell.

"Have we come to the point where we start drawing straws?" she asked, lightly, offering him the water.

"Not quite...This section was faded on the maps, I'm trying to decide which way is the best to go...Either way, I don't think it's far now."

"Good." She muttered, unable to stop herself.

He smiled ruefully, understanding as he said, "I'd estimate about fifteen minutes."

Lucas' prediction rang true and, despite the fact it felt like a week on paperwork duty to Ros, they reached the end of the tunnel in less than twenty minutes when they hit a thin grate that led into a storage cupboard, a simple panel giving the illusion that it was a blocked air vent.

Cautiously, they reconnected their comms, wincing at the sound of their own heartbeats, seeming painfully loud in the small space, both of them acutely aware of the footsteps moving beyond, with nothing but a thin, flimsy wooden door between them and discovery.

"Tariq?" Ros breathed cautiously and was rewarded by the ecstatic response,

"Ros! You made it?"

"Yes, we're in, now how do we get out?"

"OK, I take it just now you're in a cupboard of sorts and not just floating around in the middle of the wall?" Tariq said, consulting the floor plans beside him.

"Congratulations Sherlock, how do we get out?"

"Elementary my dear Rosalind."

"Tariq." She growled through gritted teeth as Lucas snorted into his coat sleeve, "You have five seconds to make me forget that you said that."

"Right, OK, when I tell you, get out of the cupboard, walk about fifty feet to your left, turn right, walk to the end of the corridor, follow it round to the left and enter the room at the end, that'll take you to the room the talks are going to be held in."

"OK, how much time do we have either side?"

"How long's a piece of string?" she could _see _him shrugging, irritatingly in front of her.

"How long does it have to be to make a tech-sized noose?"

"Right, well, someone walks by each room roughly every eight minutes, and keep in mind that that door will be locked, so..."

"Excellent."

"Well you do love a challenge." Lucas whispered in her ear.

She elbowed him in the ribs, causing his eyes to water as she caught his injured shoulder.

Ros carefully removed the thin grate in front of them, silently cursing the load, protests it made as she slid it out of place, setting it on the floor behind a bucket. Together they crept slowly from the cramped, tunnel, pausing to hastily slide the grate back in place and crouched, cautiously at the door, weapons drawn, every muscle in their bodies tensed.

They heard strong, purposeful footsteps stride past the door and seconds later Tariq hissed,

"OK, go."

"What? There's no way-"

"Trust me, go now!" he snapped, cutting vehemently across her.

Swearing and mentally picking out the song that would be played at his funeral is this got them killed, she wrenched open the door and dived to her left, Lucas at her heels, feeling as exposed as if she was strolling down Camden naked in January, Ros obeyed Tariq's instructions and they, miraculously, made it to the door undetected.

"OK, you've got about three and a half minutes." Tariq told them as Lucas dropped to his knees, lock pick already in hand.

"Are you trying for some sort of record here Tariq?" he snarled, "That's not enough time."

"It better be." Tariq and Ros snapped simultaneously.

"Cover me." Lucas told Ros shortly.

"And what do you propose I do if someone comes round the corner?" she hissed, never before had the gun in her hand felt so useless.

"You're an intelligent woman Ros, I'm sure you'll think of something."

She waited for a tense few minutes in the silence that made the time they had spent in the tunnels feel like a weekend in Barbados compared with the agonising wait Lucas was now torturing her with, until she heard footsteps in the corridor running parallel to theirs, heading towards them.

"Lucas, hurry up." Tariq breathed, unhelpfully.

"Lucas?" she said, warningly when he failed to respond.

"Minute." He hissed back,

"It better be a bloody quick minute!"

She pressed herself against the door, knowing it would offer no protection from the searching eyes of the advancing officer. Seconds before they rounded the corner, Ros toppled into the room as the lock finally shifted with a satisfying click.

Pressed against the other side of the door that Lucas had hastily swung back into place, they heard the footsteps retreat, Lucas fully closed the door again, re-locking it and turning to Ros who had slid down the panelled wall in relief.

"Leave it a little later next time why don't you Lucas?" Harry's voice said, evidently the rest of the team had joined Tariq.

Now that they were in no imminent danger of being found and shot, Lucas and Ros took the chance to look around the large, luxurious room. In the centre of the room was a large, thick, oak table that looked like an ice rink, the polished surface gleaming in the weak, morning sunlight. Above the table an enormous chandelier twinkled mockingly at them, suspended from a thick silver chain, like a giant Victorian glitter ball. The room itself was coated in beautiful oak panelling that ran around the room, the large walk-in-wardrobe to their left seamlessly incorporated into it. The room had originally been a bedroom, and when it had been converted, rather than rip out the beautiful wardrobe, the owners had chosen to keep it, using it as a coat hanger during meetings. The craftsmanship was such, that it was difficult to tell where the wardrobe was, meaning that the only break in the ornate woodwork were the floor length windows on the opposite wall.

Peeling themselves from the floor, they slowly moved over to the window, both of them magnetically attracted to the giant, 'snipers welcome here' beacons that were glaring, mockingly at them from the across the polished wooden table.

Carefully manipulating the handles, Lucas found that the window would swing smoothly into the room on well oiled hinges, leaving a gaping wound in the wall, more than capable of accommodating a bullet. Ros leaned out of it, getting a better look at their surroundings,

"Shit." She muttered as Lucas, also glancing out, experienced similar feelings.

"What?" demanded a chorus of frustrated voices in their ears,

"It's like a giant square doughnut..." Lucas muttered hollowly, looking out at the sickening courtyard beyond

"Short of holding these talks in the basement, there's nowhere they can't get to them." Ros said, for the benefit of anyone who was struggling with the concept of Lucas' doughnut metaphor.

"What now?" Ruth asked softly,

Harry answered, "These talks _must _go ahead, any attempt to stop them or prevent the President from attending now would be catastrophic, we'll just have to stop them from the inside, we have enough information to know what and when this attack is, that should be enough. Search the room for their bugs, plant ours and then check back in, we'll see where we go from there, no-one should disturb you." He said, firmly.

"Harry, whatever my personal feelings towards the man, we cannot use the American President as a piece of meat and hope we can yank him out of the lion enclosure in time!" Ros snarled,

"We can and we will, I take it that the combined efforts of the British government and security services can stop one lunatic with a gun?" Harry snapped, "This is not a negotiation Ros, do it."

"Is it time to start packing for Switzerland yet?" Ros hissed, as Harry disconnected their comms to allow them to plant the bugs in peace.

"No...He's right Ros, we don't have a choice."

"There's always a choice..."

"Don't pull your philosophical crap on me, what would you do in his position?"

"Not this." She replied, stubbornly,

"Then what? We don't have any other option that won't lead to a collapse of any chance we have at peace. These talks _have _to go ahead, the President will just have to deal with being used as a worm on a hook for the next three days, shouldn't be too difficult for him."

Reluctantly seeing some sense in what he was saying, she joined him in examining the room for any bugs before carefully helping him to plant their own.

They had been working in a tense silence for a little over half an hour; they're jangled nerves gradually becoming more accustomed to the threatening footsteps that trotted, warningly past their door every few minutes, when a rattle at the doorknob and hushed, excitable voices made them both freeze.

"We can't! We really, really can't." A woman's voice giggled on the other side of the door.

"We shouldn't...doesn't mean we won't."

Ros and Lucas stared at one another in horror as their muscles contracted in horror.

She laughed again and said, "But it's locked."

"I have a key." He replied, smirking, proving this last statement as they heard it being inserted into the lock.

Lucas jumped noiselessly from the table and pulled open the door to the walk-in-wardrobe and hissed to Ros,

"Come on."

"Lucas! We need something better than hoping we're going to topple into bloody Narnia!" she snarled.

"Ros, _in_ now!" he snapped, dragging her inside as the door was thrown, grandly open.

"What the Hell!" the woman explained as Ros and Lucas stared at each other in horror; sure they had left it too late.

"What's wrong?" he asked,

"There was someone in here; I saw something dart into that wardrobe, just there as you opened the door." She said, pointing insistently to Ros and Lucas' hiding place.

"You're crazy." He said, dismissively

"No, no I'm, not, check it if you don't believe me."

Lucas and Ros glanced at each other as the defiant footsteps marched towards the wardrobe.

He wrenched open the wardrobe doors, laying bare its insides,

"See, I told you, you're crazy, paranoid." He smirked, closing the doors over again.

"Well, this is cosy." Lucas smirked as Ros grimaced at the couple in the room beyond.

"Priest hole?" she asked, as Lucas nodded as much as was possible in the confined space behind the wardrobe, "How did you know it was there?"

"I didn't." He said, having the decency to flush as he smiled and explained, "I made an educated guess when I saw that the back panel had slipped out of place, one end was raised higher than the other, there was a handle at the top that released it..."

She rolled her eyes at him before being struck by a sudden thought, "Can we open it from the inside?"

"...We'll soon find out..."

A/N: Thanks for reading, hopefully this was believable enough :) review if you can.


	17. Darcy and Rosalind

**Chapter 17**

Darcy and Rosalind

"Ros, Lucas, I've had a thought." Tariq began,

"I think it shows the extent of my distress that I would happily listen to Tariq's proposal in order to drown out Darcy and Elizabeth out there." Ros said, grimacing

"What is it Tariq?" Lucas said, nudging Ros.

"You won't like it." He cautioned,

"I'll like it more than thinking I've battled up the aisle of small talk only for you to walk out on me with cold feet now." Ros informed him.

"Alright, I noticed that your friends, Darcy and Elizabeth, they both have ear pieces..." Tariq began in a rush, fearing the wroth of Ros, "I did a little digging, everyone working inside that building has them, it's how they communicate with each other."

"Thank you for the technology talk Tariq, as MI-5 officers, neither of us were aware of the functions of ear pieces." Ros said, drily,

"Well I had to be sure, call it a flaw of my generation." Tariq replied daringly, Ros' face darkened as Lucas shook with silent laughter and Tariq became infinitely grateful that ear pieces worked over long distances, "The point is, these are old school, and they're tuned to something similar to radio waves, if you can get me the frequency we can listen to everything they're saying to one another."

"Glad to see you think 'our generation' can handle radios." Ros said, through gritted teeth, the effect ruined when she added, "How do we get access to them?"

"You'll need to get your hands on one of those ear pieces and get it to me, from there I can work it out."

"Oh is that all? How wonderful Tariq, Lucas will just stick me in a harness and lower me from the ceiling to pluck it from the ear of the sleeping security guard." Ros snarled,

"To call a spade a spade, what Ros is saying is that we can't just wander up to one of them and politely ask if they mind us borrowing their ear piece, the point is to _avoid _being seen."

"Really? I thought Ros' suggestion was a good one." Tariq smirked, "I _know _that, I've found a different way to get your spade."

"I'm listening." Lucas said as Ros murmured, "God help us."

"There's a little staff room downstairs, I've been keeping my eye on it, they go in there, dump their stuff before heading off to their rooms, there's a little box full of ear pieces down there."

"I'll grab my fishing rod..." Ros murmured,

"How far is it?" Lucas asked, more diplomatically,

"Three floors down, two blocks over."

"Are you serious? I nearly had a stroke navigating down three _corridors."_ Ros exploded, quietly.

"Losing your touch?" Lucas teased, as Tariq poured salt on the wound, saying,

"I thought you liked a challenge?"

"Yes, the daily challenge I face not murdering you two in your sleep...Is it doable?" she asked quietly.

"Nothing is impossible Ros."

"I don't know what you've been smoking Tariq, save me some, in the meantime, how likely is it that we'll be shot attempting this?"

"If you follow my instructions, whatever comes right before zero." He replied, chirpily,

"Wonderful, we're in a building full of armed guards and more security cameras than Harry's house but we have an over-enthusiastic student willing to use us as a real-life video game...How reassuring." Ros muttered, "Tell me when the canoodling couple get bored and we'll get this over with."

* * *

"Harry?" Ruth said, pausing in the doorway,

"What is it? Something gone wrong with Ros and Lucas?" he asked, sharply, fearing the worst and half rising from his chair,

"No, no nothing like that, biggest danger they face is Ros murdering Lucas because of Tariq." She said with a small smile,

"So, while the children are enjoying playtime, what have the adults discovered?" he said, smiling slightly, relief flooding him, his default setting was not to view the world with rose tinted glasses, but whenever his team were in the field, they were crushed beneath the sea of realism and paranoia.

"Not much I'm afraid. We double checked all of the people working at the talks, not just those involved in the Kieran Estate, they're all clean. Either our information's faulty or this group are exceptionally clever."

"I'm not sure which ones worse..." Harry sighed, running a hand over his face,

"I don't think our intel's solid...This group know exactly what they're doing, they're playing this perfectly, they know that the more attention they attract the more chance they have of being stopped, they're not taking any risks."

"And that worries me a great deal." Harry said, softly.

"We need people on the inside; we need to know what's going on in there."

"Well fortunately, that happy responsibility falls to myself and Sofia, we'll be seeing the Home Secretary in a few hours."

"Are you sure he's prepared? He was visited by Ros so recently." She said with a small smirk,

"He'll have to be."

"It'll be good experience, if he can deal with you lot he'll have no problem anywhere else."

Harry chuckled, "That's true, first however, I have to take a call from our leading man at the CIA, and he wants to be absolutely sure that his President will be given the utmost care while he's here..." he said, the contempt clinging to his words.

"In this case he has every reason to be concerned, for a change." She pointed out,

"Perhaps, but I could do without a two hour phone call attempting to ensure the paranoid bugger that I will personally pick out all the blue M&M's from his dear President's bowl if it will shut him up."

"Are you going to tell them?"

"That someone is attempting to assassinate their President and decimate the peace talks he's become so heavily and publically involved in, well I just don't think they need to know..." he said with a smirk.

At that point the phone rang and Ruth got to her feet, Harry made to pick up the phone and said, "If the children run into trouble come and find me, otherwise..."

"We'll be fine...They should be heading back soon." She said with a reassuring smile, quietly closing the door on him.

* * *

Ros and Lucas slipped from the Priest's Hole, relieved to be finally free of the cramped conditions. Lucas stretched, wincing as his bones cracked, reminding Ros of a cat as she paced the room, trying to regain feeling in her legs as she said,

"OK Tariq, what now?"

"Just do what I say and don't get shot."

"It's your pastime of being a motivational speaker that really gives you a reason to live isn't it Tariq?"

It took them almost an hour to reach the ground floor, weaving in and out of doors and concealed in-shots, by which time Lucas had confiscated Ros' ear piece for the sake of Tariq's mental health.

As they stood a small distance away from the staff room, it became apparent that Tariq had declined to tell them what they could clearly see now, there was a constant stream of people moving in and out of the little room and the loud, raucous laughter from within told them that it was not empty.

"Tariq..." Lucas breathed,

"This is your department." He said, hurriedly, "You'll need a distraction of some kind."

Missing Ros' sarcastic comment Lucas filled the gap in the conversation murmuring, "OK, OK, let me think..."

He was rudely interrupted by two loud gunshots.

Jumping and drawing his gun he turned to face their source and found Ros standing, as bold as brass, in the centre of the corridor as people began screaming and swarming from the room, the door of which now had new decoration in the form of two bullets buried in the beautiful woodwork.

"Thinking is overrated." She said, matter-of-factly, reloading the gun as he gaped at her, "Don't waste it." She said, airily, turning to go,

"Ros."

She looked back just in time to catch the ear piece he tossed to her with a smirk.

"I'll meet you upstairs in the tunnels." She told him, reinserting the comm as she began to run in the opposite direction, "Go help you if I have to come back for you Lucas North."

Rolling his eyes and shaking his head at her temerity, wondering how she could till surprise him after all this time, waiting behind the large, ugly antique vase in the wall's in-shot they had been crouched behind until Ros had decided she was bored, as the area cleared, people either running after Ros or away from the lunatic with the gun.

Slipping noiselessly from his hiding place he crept cautiously towards the door and gently pushing it opening, examining the deep wounds Ros' bullets had punched in it. They had penetrated it about an inch before coming to a stop, creating small explosions of splintered wood in the delicately patterned door around their entry points, but they had not even reached half-way through the vault-like door.

Closing the door behind him with a soft snap and facing the room, calm and composed until he heard footsteps running towards him. Impulsively swiping an empty plastic bottle from a table at his elbow he darted into the small porch to his right. It was cool as he quietly closed the door over him, as it lead outside, but he felt a hot flush creeping up his neck as he wait, silently drawing his gun. The door behind him was not an escape route; he was cornered, knowing that the cavalry would descend upon him, drawn to the alarm activated if the door was opened.

Waiting in the darkness, prepared to use the empty drinks bottle as a makeshift silencer if he was disturbed, he listened as someone entered the room beyond and a young man's voice asked, anxiously, "Katia?" He paused for a moment, possibly receiving instructions through his ear piece because a few seconds later he scampered from the room.

Getting slowly to his feet and stowing his gun at his hip once more, Lucas cautiously advanced into the room once more, regaining his composure until it was ripped away from him again as a loud gunshot assaulted his ear.

* * *

Ros had turned tail and hurried up the corridor, suddenly feeling that her thinking may have been _under_rated. Still, never one to cry over spilt blood, she had made a decision, impulsive and reckless perhaps, but a decision nonetheless and she was sticking to it, what was done was done, and she would just have to deal with the consequences.

Besides, the act of skulking around the house with Shaggy and Scooby had been wearing thin, she needed to release the adrenaline and the energy that had been surging through her body, fuelling her instincts and telling her to _do _something, she had definitely done that.

Now that her initial moment of madness had subsided however, a plan was forcing itself into being in her mind, common sense taking over and now dictating her actions as she systematically began trying door handles.

Every one refused to budge under her insisting pressure, piquing her curiosity as she wondered how many things these people could lock up, tempted to go back and argue with the doors until they agreed to yield their secrets to her, unable to think of what they were trying so hard to protect from prying eyes.

However, stubborn as she was, no-one could accuse Ros Myers of being stupid and, in the end, logic always prevailed with her and she quickly abandoned her childish fantasies in favour of surviving the mess she had brought upon herself.

Finally finding a door that allowed her to enter, just when she was reaching the point of kicking one of them in and to Hell with the consequences, she stumbled into a room that, if the bookshelves surrounding the walls implied anything, was used as a study and crossed it in three large strides.

Using a well-place bullet to initially fracture the thick sheet of glass, she used the gun's handle to break the remaining glass in the frame before turning and heading into a nearby stair well.

"Ros!" Lucas' voice said, sharply, reminding her that he did not in fact, live in her head, and her little stunt had probably terrified him,

"I'm fine Lucas." She said quickly, before explaining, "Apparently I've jumped out of a window."

"A little warning would be nice next time." He said, reproachfully,

"Wouldn't it."

* * *

Shaking his head, partly out of irritation, partly out of relief, he began scanning the room carefully. Cigarette smoke still hung heavily in the air snatching at his eyes and lungs and almost drowning out the smell of sweat and desperation; reminding him forcibly of Russia. Even more so when his eyes fell upon the confused table of coins and cards spread out on a low, dented coffee table, the only remains of a once animated poker game.

At the heart of this upstanding, luxury country house, on the surface of which was pure and innocent as a child lurked the dirty little secrets it worked so hard to conceal. Memories and words of a long forgotten past came back to him,' _if you want to know a man, think not upon what he says, think more upon what he does not...' _He smiled slightly at the words, the only time a quotation would make sense to you was when you had experienced it for yourself...Very true.

Jerking himself from his nostalgic little reverie, he began scanning the room for what he was actually looking for, he found it, balanced precariously on top of a closet, only just visible beneath the protective shield of coats it was concealed beneath, a simple little cardboard box, the ear pieces peering out at him like scarab beetles, their long legs hooked around one another and curved around the edges of the box.

"Wait a minute Lucas." Tariq's voice said, as he began to cross the room, delicately picking his way over the items strewn randomly over the floor, so as not to disturb anything.

"What's wrong Tariq?"

"Chances are the ear piece you're about to pick up will interfere with our comms, we might be able to pick up the odd scraps but to all intents and purposes, you'll be flying blind."

"No." Ros broke in flatly,

"Look-"Lucas began patiently,

"No, that's not a suggestion Lucas it's an order." She growled, "It's too risky."

"But it wasn't too risky to stand in the middle of the corridor and start shooting at unsuspecting doors to turn yourself into the rabbit at a greyhound race?" he countered, infuriatingly, "Getting access to that frequency is effectively bugging every single person in this building, it's invaluable."

"So are you." She shot back reflexively, swearing internally as her brain caught up with what her mouth had just said,

"Ros, I'll be fine." He murmured, before cutting the connection.

* * *

"Son-of-a-bitch." She snarled, slamming her hand into a nearby wall, bruising the knuckles,

She stood, seething, at his damn heroics before the sound of footsteps pounding in her ears jolted her back to reality.

Turning and beginning to jog down the corridor, looking for another stair well, still cursing Lucas she barked sharply, "Tariq?" hoping her tone implied that she was not in the mood to bandy words over her sentimental slip.

Sensing it would be tantamount to suicide all he told her quickly, "Go straight along the corridor, the last door on your left leads to stairs, hurry up, they'll be on you in a minute."

Balancing speed with silence she hurried down the corridor, ducking into the door as she had been instructed saying, shortly, "Lucas?" as she did so.

"No comms, but I'm keeping an eye on him on the cameras, but from his end he'll have to do it the old fashioned way, rely on his own eyes and ears. Looks like he's heading for the same place as you but he's taking the scenic route."

"How charming." She muttered, through gritted teeth.

The door banging at the bottom of the stairs pushed him to the back of her mind as she hurried on, Tariq hastily feeding her instructions as she went.

* * *

Lucas quietly crept down the corridor, attempting to visualise the floor plans while he worried about Ros. One reason they had been so reluctant to drop communication was not only because Tariq could not direct him or warn him of imminent threats, but it meant that they did not know what had become of the other, something neither of them welcomed.

Locating a stair well he dived into it, the cold embrace of the clinical, white stairs being welcome after the suffocating luxury of the corridor beyond. As he slowly climbed the stairs he examined the ear piece he know held, protectively in his hand. It was activated by heat and so when it had been in contact with his skin it had started firing off its own signals, interfering with his ear piece, forcing him to remove it to stop it squealing in protest. However while this feature meant that the comm saved battery when it was not in use, it also meant that there was no way for him to switch it off.

Inspiration struck and he decided to use it to the best of his abilities, inserting it in his ear as he climbed, hoping to hear something of Ros' fate._ Only Ros Myers could convince herself that it was a good idea to stick a giant neon sign on her back and scream come and get me to a building full of armed guards..._ The faint mumblings he could understand in the comms, for efficiency everything was spoken in shorthand, he felt fairly sure that Ros had thus far escaped detection.

As he reached the top of the stairs he examined the very inappropriately placed statue at the top and discovered that it slid back fairly comfortably to reveal the trap door he had been searching for beneath it. Sliding down into the suffocating tunnel he replaced the statue as best he could before fully dropping the trapdoor on himself, hoping that the action would cause the statue to roll forwards and set off down the tunnel, knowing that it would take him back, within feet of the one Ros had promised to meet him at.

He knew that Ros would not be able to proceed this way, Tariq would not be able to direct her underground and if they realised they knew about the tunnels, all of their escape routes would be cut off, something she would not risk. As he picked his way through the warren of tunnels that snaked under the house, with people moving around overhead, reminded him fondly of his childhood, apart from the terror that flared within his chest as he wondered what had become of Ros.

* * *

As it turned out Ros had made it to the corridor and was looking around in Lucas, employing some of Harry's favourite curses as she waited, every muscle feeling as though it was being stretched like an elastic band as she waited for Lucas.

"Anything from Lucas Tariq?" she asked,

"No but, shit-"

This caught her off guard, she swore like a Scottish sailor in comparison to the mild-mannered tech, whose language indicated that something was seriously wrong, "What?" she demanded, imagining Lucas' brains splattered across one of the many presumptuous paintings that adorned the walls.

"You're about to have company." He told her shortly,

This proved to be quite true as, when she turned to gauge the distance of her attacker, she found his fist connecting, painfully with her chest, sending her backwards as her fingers involuntarily released her grip on the gun.

It went spinning over her head and as she rolled out of the way of a second blow she kicked it, sending it spinning down the corridor out of both of their reach as he lunged for her again, a short, wicked knife in his hand.

Seizing his arm at the elbow and holding it firmly as she kicked, violently upwards his scream blocking out the sound as the bone snapped and he dropped the knife. Fighting back she clawed at his eyes as he snarled and reached for the gun at his hip.

She dived out of the way as he fired a clumsy shot towards her; the bullet became lodged in the thick carpet where, seconds before, her chest had been. Snatching up the knife that innocently nudged her foot she darted round the side and launched herself at him, this time however he was ready for her and the handle of the gun impacted her temple, causing her to crumple to the floor.

Panting and staring down at her contemptuously as her vision blurred and a metallic taste filled her mouth, the world spinning sickeningly in front of her. He placed one foot on her chest, the pressure he applied causing her to choke and splutter for breath. He carefully lined the gun up with her heart as her fingers scrabbled uselessly for her own weapon that she could dimly make out to her left that seemed closer than the three feet that separated them.

Smiling cruelly as she struggled weakly, her head protesting and swimming in response to the smallest of movements, he carefully readied the gun and placed his finger on the trigger.

The gunshot exploded in the silence; horribly clear through the miasma of confusion that she was drowning in, as clear as the sensation of warm blood that covered her chest.

* * *

A/N: I know this chapter was a little over dramatic with action for actions sake and not much conceivable plot, but I had far too much fun writing it, so shoot me for my indulgence :) Hope you enjoyed anyway, thank you all for reading and reviewing.


	18. Only Fools and Remorses

**Chapter 18**

Only Fools and Remorses

Lucas was crouched quietly in the tunnel, standing beside her prone figure, hoping something would happen before he roasted in the enclosed tunnel. After the showdown with the thug that had cornered her he had dragged her back down into the safety of the tunnel and was beginning to wish he had not. The longer he spent crouched in the small cavern, the more the walls seemed to close in around them.

When they had travelled through the tunnels to get here in the first place it had been fine, he had been in control of himself as they were moving, now, alone in the stifling cave, feeling the weight of the world pressing in around them, he began to feel the familiar feeling of terror clawing at his stomach, the one that followed his nightmares of Russia and preceded total surrender of his sense and senses.

He glanced down at her again, her top was soaked with scarlet blood but that was not the problem. The problem was that they were stuck in this damn cave and no-one knew they were there, with the walls caving in on them, surely they would suffocate, they would die down here, because he could not leave her, would not leave her, and so he condemned them both to death.

Catching himself as his thoughts ran away with him he took a deep breath and closed his eyes focussing on his breathing. He was interrupted by a choke and a snarl,

"And where the Hell were you?"

He smiled and said, without opening his eyes, "I can't be in two places at once Ros, and they banned human cloning."

"Jesus..." she groaned, sitting up,

"No, just me." He said, mildly, smirking, "How hard did you hit your head?"

"If I could see straight I would shoot you..." she informed him.

"How do you feel?" he asked, concerned, handing her a bottle of water.

She accepted and said, "God you sound like Ruth, I'm fine."

"Let me see," he said, gently brushing the wound at her temple,

"Don't." She snapped, batting him off, she took another drink before saying, "You took your bloody time."

"You're welcome."

"What did you do with him?"

"Apparently he jumped out of a window." Lucas said, matter-of-factly, reluctantly accepting the bottle of water she was thrusting so insistently at him that it was beginning to slop out of the top onto his hand.

"You shot him Lucas; I don't think that will fly."

"Probably not, but they'll make it, they don't want this announced to the press any more than we do. They'll cover it up, all of it, at least until these talks are over."

"You really don't seem too cut up about this Lucas..." she said, quietly, becoming very interested in her hands, it was not like he had never killed anyone in the line of duty before, but it was not usually a security guard, generally it was a psychotic terrorist threatening world domination, whatever the circumstances, however much adrenaline had overtaken the guard and made him act irrationally, he had only been doing his job...

"He was going to kill you Ros...There was no choice in the matter, and I have no regrets." He said, softly, as if reading her mind, a habit he had fallen into altogether too easily recently. "Can you stand?" he asked, softly,

It was only then she realised that his hands were trembling on the bottle and he was paler than usual, while she felt as though someone had cleaved her head in two and she was in danger of throwing up if she stood, she recognised that he would end up in a far worse condition if she insisted on keeping him trapped down here for much longer.

"Yes." She said, stubbornly, using the wall a little too much for support.

He noticed this, and also knew why she had done it and so, ignoring her protests, took an arm and wrapped it around his neck and supported most of her weight as they set off slowly down the tunnels.

It took them far longer than they would have liked and both were relieved when they reached the end of the underground maze, both craving fresh air and sunlight, neither of them willing to travel via the underground for several months after this,

"Well, if nothing else," she said, as Lucas gently set her down on the soft ground and handed her the water bottle again, "At least we became intimately familiar with the layout of the house, I doubt we've seen the last of it."

"Indeed." He said, shortly, closing his eyes and taking several deep breaths, bracing himself against a tree and leaning forwards, hands on his knees.

"Are you OK?" she asked, quietly, knowing perfectly well that he was not,

"I'll be fine, _Ruth_." He said, smirking, and knowing that his last comment would irritate her enough to shut her up.

"What happened?" she asked, finally, partly out of a real desire to know, and partly out of a desire to have him focus on whatever flashbacks he had been struggling to suppress for the last few hours, knowing that for all his jokes and assurances, he was far from fine. She now knew that the gunshot had belonged to Lucas, and the blood that she was covered in did not belong to her but she wanted him to say _something _anything and she hoped he would tell her something she had not already deduced.

"I came round the corner, he was standing over you holding a gun, I put two and two together, shot first and asked questions later...I take it you weren't just role playing?"

"No, bastard caught me off guard." She said, sounding distinctly annoyed,

"You passed out somewhere around this point, I pushed him out of a window and carried you back down into the tunnel." He continued, matter-of-factly, beginning to pace around the clearing,

"Right, we should be making tracks, we need to get back on The Grid soon or Ruth'll have had kittens..."

She couldn't stand his pacing, after so long in Russia, most of Lucas' habits were hidden along with just about everything else, from his deep thoughts and feelings to his favourite colour, however the one thing he insisted on doing, understandably, was the one thing that drove her up the wall.

He smiled and slipped the car keys from her pocket, "Just in case." He smirked as she scowled.

* * *

"Ruth's heard back from Ros and Lucas, briefly, they're both fine, though apparently he suspects she has a concussion because she's more irritable than usual." Sofia told Harry, smirking as she hung up.

"Ros Myers? Irritable? Whatever next..."

She grinned and said, "How did it go with your favourite member of the CIA?"

"If the whole world was as pretentious as he is, I'd have launched a global genocide to prevent the world's only impression of the human race being _that._" He said, contemptuously, eliciting a small grin from Sofia, who had more than expected this and was not disappointed by the entertaining rant that followed. "What do you think of our Home Secretary?" he asked, finally stopping his rant due to the irritating necessity of having to breathe.

"It had been a while since I'd been in a politicians office, if possible even more over the top than I remembered, and we're in a recession...As for the man himself, I choose to reserve judgement...Man's like an onion, too many layers to see from the surface, cutting in too soon will result in floods of tears, no I'll wait, and let him peel himself."

Harry, who by now was becoming fairly used to her strange metaphors, most of which seemed to involve food or tea, nodded and said, "I agree...Slippery fish, not at all as innocent as he makes out I think."

"I think you're right...Strange man, I've never met anyone like him before, though maybe I've just been out of the game for too long."

"I don't think even when you were out of the game you ever stopped playing." Harry said, wryly, seeing from her smirk that he was right, "Even so, he's odd, I'll give you that..."

"But odd for us or odd for them?"

"You suspect him of being a double agent?" Harry said, generally these things were not spoken aloud on hunches, thought yes, guessed, definitely, not this.

"I don't think he got to where he is without being able to play the game, and play it well at that. And I want to know why he's being so nicey nicey with the North Koreans."

"Well that's understandable, if the North Korean's make a deal during these peace talks, some of that will reflect very well on him."

"Yes, so offering them tea and scones is understandable, not growing the tea himself and giving them a grand tour of the bakery, no something's going on there, or I'm a paranoid lunatic."

"Well yes, but that doesn't mean you might not be right." Harry smiled, wondering how long it would have been till she mentioned tea again and thinking that the junior officers would soon turn this into a drinking game.

As they crossed into the Home Secretary's lavishly furnished office, they were informed by his harassed looking PA that he would be along in a few minutes.

"If prison teaches you anything it's that minimalism really is the way forwards..." she said, looking around the room with distaste.

"Really, I would have thought it would have had the opposite effect."

"No, you learn to be happy with what you've got and then you realise that there isn't really a place for the things you don't, ask Lucas, I bought him a bank one year for Christmas and watched as he almost had a stroke trying to decide where to put it..."

Harry chuckled at this, it was something that he had noticed, the younger man did not have many habits but that was one of them, everything had its place and God help whoever attempted to change that, before picking up on something he did _not _know, "A bank?" he asked curiously,

She smiled and shook her head as the door opened and the Home Secretary entered the room.

"Sir Harry and the charming Sofia...Where is Ms Myers?" he enquired with 'irritating bounce' as Harry described it later.

"Otherwise engaged I'm afraid, so you'll have to make do with us." Harry told him, taking his seat once more.

"Oh I'll try and manage." He said, with a small smile, winking at Sofia "So, why am I having to make do with you just now? Another visit so soon? You're spoiling me Harry." He said, leaning back in his chair and watching them carefully over his interlocking fingers.

"We need to discuss this country's current condition." Harry began grimly,

"You make it sound as though Britain's been infected with the Black Plague." He said, cautiously,

"If this goes badly you may wish it had been." Sofia injected flatly,

"Dear me, what's happening?" he asked, quietly,

"We have received intelligence relating to an attack on the President, while he is attending these talks-"Harry began,

"Yes, the two lovely ladies you sent two days ago told me as much..." He said, watching him carefully,

"We have more than guesses and inferences now, the President _is _being targeted and this places us in a delicate situation." Sofia said, in no mood to dance to the Home Secretary's ridiculous tune.

"Of course, and I take it you've decided against telling our favourite cousins?" he said, perceptively,

"We have. If the CIA gets hold of this now, it will be catastrophic for these peace talks, not to mention our relationship with the Americans." Harry said, "One way or the other, the President _must _attend these talks, and we all felt this was slightly more likely if he wasn't in the crosshairs of some lunatic."

"I agree...Do you have any intelligence on this particular lunatic?"

"We do. This attack is being carried out by a group called 'Hiroshima' and while they want to assassinate the President, their main aim is the collapse of these peace talks and of international peace in general. They wish to provoke a nuclear war, believing that we're always headed in that direction, and to do it now."

"Just when you think you've hear it all." He said, loftily,

"Then I meet you." Sofia said, casually.

The Home Secretary laughed at this and said, "Wherever did they find you?"

"We're not entirely sure...We can only guess." Harry said with a small smirk, glancing sideways at Sofia.

"I'm sensing that you didn't just come here to confirm something you've already told me and give me a few more snippets about an extremist group, you want something Harry, what is it?"

"Permission." Sofia said, quietly,

"I don't think there would have been anything you could have said that would have terrified me more Miss Fletcher, MI-5 asking for permission..."

"I could have asked for money..." she smirked

"Indeed." He chuckled, "You'll go far with us I think Miss Fletcher, now tell me, what do you want permission to do?"

"I need you to grant me the ability to seed some of my officers within the talks. We can't stop the assassination from the outside; it must be done from within. I want-"

"Harry, Harry, I've already said, I don't want your people serving me drinks, openness and trust is not bred from the secret service being party to these talks, I've already said I don't want you to make a big song and dance out of this-"

"Well someone's going to." Sofia said, flatly, "And what kind of trust is bred from one of the most influential men in the world being murdered in your playground? Especially if the other leaders realise you knew he was in danger and failed to protect him, or them for that matter."

"Well I'm quite sure you won't fail to-"

"No, we won't, if you let us do this." Harry said, jumping in and building on top of the foundation Sofia had laid,

"Harry, if they find out, I've said,"

"You're worried about a politician being caught lying?" Harry scoffed, "That's like catching cold in winter, it's to be expected..."

"And as we are, as you so rightly pointed out, your _secret _service, then there's no reason that they should find out." Sofia pointed out, delicately,

"Even so, it's a terrible risk to take...We're trying to build peace and stability here, you have no idea how delicate and tentative these relationships are-"

"Yes and I'm sure that the assassination of one of the leaders attempting to bring about this delicate peace and stability you talk about won't do nearly as much damage as diplomats whispering about a few little white lies." Harry snapped,

"I don't want this to happen anymore than you do, but it's my job to-"

"Yes, and it's our job to ensure you _can _do your job, and no amount of truth and openness will allow you to do that in the face of this." Sofia snapped,

"...I presume this would be discrete?" he said, looking distinctly uncomfortable,

"Of course Home Secretary, only a few of my best officers would be placed under cover, assisting the various delegations on behalf of the British government." Harry replied reassuringly, though Sofia could see he was fast losing patience with the other man's insufferable whining.

"Is it really necessary to have them be directly involved with the diplomats, I'm sure you could do this more discretely than having them as aides for the delegations, that just screams mistrust Harry-"

"That's because we do mistrust them, and they mistrust us. None of us will be going into these talks without several extra cards up our sleeves and guns in our socks." Harry snapped, as Sofia fought to keep her face impassive as the Home Secretary blanched. "With all due respect Home Secretary, either you're being manipulated by something beyond your control, or your stupid beyond my contempt, whatever the case, I don't have time for this. Call me when whichever of these options permits you to come up with an answer."

He got abruptly to his feet and stormed from the room leaving an amused Sofia sitting opposite a very shell-shocked Home Secretary.

"This is why visits from us are rarely pleasant." She said, with a small smile, also standing, "Have a nice day, Home Secretary." She said, patting him sympathetically on the shoulder before following Harry.

* * *

"Bloody politicians..." he fumed as she jogged up to meet him, "The corrupt ones have brains and the innocent ones are idiots...I can't decide which bothers me more."

"You think this is all just politics?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.

"It's a little too familiar, they all want to be bloody peacemakers and get their names in the history books for saving the world from themselves...You think there's more to it?" he asked, pausing in his furious tirade and throwing her a questioning look.

"Might be nothing but we'll soon find out." She said, looking worryingly satisfied with herself,

"What have you done?" Harry asked, suddenly concerned, knowing her it could be anything from hacking his email to charming his cabinet into releasing an incriminating statement to the papers.

"Don't look so worried, I just put a tiny little bug on his collar...Harmless really."

"You illegally placed a bug on the Home Secretary?" Harry hissed, torn between being impressed and livid.

"That's not like us at all...It won't be a problem." She said, smoothly, ducking into the car, driver's side after lifting the keys from Harry's pocket while he was otherwise engaged with the Home Secretary.

Ignoring her pick pocketing and control issues in favour of concentrating on her new habit of digitally stalking the man who paid both of their wages, he said, "It will be a problem if he finds it."

"Well, based on your observations, if he's an idiot, he won't find it, and if he's corrupt, he won't find it until it's too late...Personally my money's on the latter, which is far more fun."

"Fun?" Harry repeated, weakly,

"It has to be Harry, or we'd all be robots."

"Sometimes I think that would be preferable..."

* * *

Lucas and Ros wandered back onto The Grid, to her extreme irritation he had driven her back to her home and had refused to let her back into the car until she had showered and changed and he was satisfied that her head was not in imminent danger of imploding.

"Thank God." Ruth breathed, as they walked towards her, settling themselves at their desks, "Are you alright?"

"No Ruth, I just dragged myself up from the car trailing my entrails behind me so I could see your cheerful face." Ros dead-panned, earning her a sharp nudge in the ribs from Lucas.

"What happened?" she asked, directing her question at Lucas.

After silencing Ros with a look, he proceeded to explain what had happened, from their initial journey through the tunnels, their examination and interruption in the reception room as well as Tariq's idea about the bugs and Ros' distraction (heavily edited) up to his arrival in the corridor whereupon he shot the guard threatening Ros.

"Well thank goodness for your timing Lucas." Ruth murmured, as Tariq ambled up to them,

"Did you get it?" he asked Lucas, expectantly, making to take a drink from his fresh cup of coffee before thinking better of it and handing it to Ros instead.

"Yes." Ros said, shortly, as Lucas fished the ear piece out of his pocket, "And God help you if I can't hear every single person in that building _breathe _on demand."

At this point, a soft hiss from the pods distracted them as Harry and Sofia entered the room as well,

"I hear you almost got shot." He said, airily to Ros,

"Almost, unlike some people." She said, smirking at Lucas, who scowled good-naturedly at her. "How did it go with the Home Secretary?"

Harry muttered darkly under his breath, "We'll see..." before retreating to the confines of his office.

"Harry walked out on him telling him he was either an idiot or traitor; he's been trying to decide which one's worse since." Sofia supplied helpfully, taking a seat behind the desk.

"About time." Ros muttered,

"Sofia? Ros? A word?" Harry called from his office, having made a decision about something.

The two women Ros obligingly and slipped into the office, Sofia closing the door behind them,

"The listening device you placed on the Home Secretary, what can you get from it?"

"Whatever he says in its presence, only drawback is that it's all self-contained, I'll need to physically get it back to listen to it, I couldn't risk having it transmit, they would have picked up on the signal."

"You bugged the Home Secretary?" Ros asked, sounding amused,

"Yes she did, and it was either brilliant or suicidal-"Harry began before being interrupted by the phone,

"Speak of the devil?" Ros said, as Harry confirmed it was the Home Secretary.

He was about to pick up the phone when Sofia placed a hand on it and said, "Maybe someone who's not recently called him an idiotic traitor should get that?" she suggested with a grin,

"Be my guest."

"Home Secretary, Harry Pearce's office." She said, smoothly, smirking and putting it on speaker so Harry and Ros could listen in,

"Who is this? Where is Harry Pearce?" he demanded,

"Sofia Fletcher, I'm afraid Harry's not here, if you want to sack him you'll have to wait until he comes back from his lunch break." She said, pleasantly, "Can I take a message?"

There was a pause until he said, finally, "You tell him he can carry out this harebrained scheme of his, but if any one of you so much as _dreams _about MI-5, I'll have him taken out and shot." He hung up irritably,

"And here I had a lovely little monologue prepared about Loch Lomond to distract him..." Sofia smirked, delicately replacing the phone in its cradle, "I'd say that went fairly well considering."

"Indeed, so, we make a few calls and have us integrated among the diplomats." Ros said,

"Oh I've already done that...The three of you can start drawing straws as to who gets who." Harry replied, mildly, looking faintly pleased with himself as he leaned back in his chair.

A/N: Won't be another up-date until Monday evening I'm afraid, in the mean time, hopefully you all enjoyed this, I find it damn near impossible to write Harry so fingers crossed this was OK, anyone with tips on how to write him is welcome :) Thanks for reading and reviewing!


	19. Terror and Trackers

**Chapter 19**

Terror and Trackers

"Right, I now present to you, your new best friends for the next few days." Tariq smirked, removing eight thick files and spreading them out on the table before them like a political pack of cards.

It had been decided to split the eight nations between four MI-5 officers, two each; Ros, Lucas, Sofia and, to Ros' disgust, Ruth. This had sparked an intense debate whereby Harry pointed out that Ruth was more qualified than any of them for this job, considering her fluency in several languages and Ros retorted that Google Translate would do the same job but she wouldn't want it accompanying her. In the end staffing issues forced them to agree to disagree.

"Sofia, you are entertaining the Russians and the Americans as Kate Connor." Tariq said, handing her a new driver's license, passport, birth certificate and two thick files concerning the American President and the Russian Prime Minister

"Wonderful...These talks are already making history, I'm officially the first thing willingly shared by America and Russia since about 1945...Who organised this?"

"They did." Harry said his voice smothered in sarcasm as he continued, "Home Secretary decided that in the 'interests of fairness' they should decide, put names in a hat or something...Bloody idiot..."

Sofia snorted as Ros said, "Congratulations, you're worth nothing more to this country than as a prize in a political raffle."

"Well the politicians will be presented with their winnings in just over an hour, can we get on this?" Harry said testily.

"Yes they will and yes we can." Tariq said, grinning, "Lucas, you have Britain and France and you are now Liam Ford." Lucas accepted his new identity and responsibilities and began flicking through the files.

"We're watching the British too? Or is this just in the interest of appearances?"

"Appearances and equality." Harry said curtly.

"We're not biased here at MI-5, we don't trust anyone." Ros translated, smirking,

"No we don't, for good reason. In the current climate, political paranoia is at an all time high and as a result our best new friend the Home Secretary has insisted that he is the only one in the British delegation to know of your true identities and we want to keep an eye on him anyway."

"Don't know why you complain so much Harry, sounds like a man after your own heart." Lucas grinned,

"Unfortunately I don't think his reasons are for protecting this country and justifying a greater than healthy intake of Scotch...Tariq?"

"Right, yes Ros, you will be introducing yourself to North Korea and Pakistan as Sara West." Tariq informed her hastily getting back on track.

"Lovely..."

"Which leaves Ruth as the charming Helen Bond with India and China." Tariq concluded.

"You will be meeting the main players from each delegation in a few hours to introduce yourselves and allow everyone to meet everyone else and for whatever other pretentious, ridiculous reasons the Home Secretary has fabricated." Harry growled, "However for all his short-comings, of which he has enough to claim disability benefits for, this is actually beneficial to us as it gives us the opportunity to place trackers on the diplomats between tea and handshakes.

Tariq took over at this point producing a small plastic coated tracker and placing it delicately on the table for their inspection. It was about the size of a grain of rice and looked about as interesting.

Seeing that they all looked unimpressed, Tariq explained, "Underneath the plastic cover the tracker is coated in a thin film of a quick-drying glue like substance, whatever you put it on, watch, phone, pocket, it'll stick to like sarcasm does to Ros." He finished with a smirk in her direction as he passed out several of the trackers for them to examine.

"These talks will run for two days before the attack and in order for us to identify the insiders, the first step is knowing where they are and who they're with, these trackers are essential."

"Do we have anything at all to point us towards any potentials?" Lucas asked,

"No, Salko didn't know, or didn't tell, either way, we haven't got anything to start with. Even if we can get trackers on them we'll still struggle to separate them all out, they're careful; they know what they're doing." Ros said, with her usual sunny take on things.

"Where are we meeting them today?" Ruth asked,

"The Home Secretary's office." Harry replied

"Showing off his antique car boot sale of junk to the foreign diplomats is he?" Sofia asked to general amusement.

"Indeed...I want you all ready to view said car boot sale in half an hour." Harry said, clearly dismissing them.

...

Harry retreated to his office and endured that his team were all occupied before dialling the number he had committed to memory while simultaneously praying that he would never have to use it.

"Yes, this is Harry Pearce...I'm calling Sun Storm."

He waited, running a hand over his face as he did. This was not something he had wanted to do, and knew what it would mean for him if it came to this which was equally disturbing. It had been gnawing away at him for weeks, but it had only taken possession of his being in the last few days, something that had not gone unnoticed by his team. They were beginning to see the cracks showing in his usually mirror smooth exterior.

"Who did you tell?" he snarled without preamble in response to the 'oily' hello on the other end of the line.

"Dear, dear Harry, in these uncertain times, pleasantries are considered a necessity if we're to avoid offence and ultimate bloodshed."

"Fuck pleasantries." He snapped, forgetting just how much he had been irritated by the pretentious idiot on the other end of the line, "I can guarantee there will be blood spilt over this, whether or not I ask whether or not one has had a fine morning. They know."

"You may need to be more specific than that Harry."

"Don't bullshit me. How did they find out?"

"Well I'm sure I don't know, but I don't see that it matters...What matters is, what are you going to do now that they know."

Snarling and slamming the phone down none to gently into its cradle causing it to bounce back out again, lying innocently mocking him on the desk.

He should not have expected any better. He _hadn't _expected any better but that did not mean he was not allowed to be in a foul mood following the conversation with the insufferable... His thoughts ran away with him, a mixture of curses and paranoid thoughts as to what he could have given away in the irrational phone call, before reason returned and he reminded himself that it had needed done.

A gentle tap at the door interrupted his thoughts.

"Ruth, come in." He said tiredly, not having to look up to know that it was her.

"Are you alright Harry?" she asked concerned as she hovered in the doorway, "I can come back if-"

"No, of course not, everything is fine Ruth, come in. What is it?" He asked. Everything would always be fine...

"I just, I don't Harry, I just think, I mean I don't think I-" she began haltingly, unsure of how to speak now that she was taking part in this conversation outside of her own head.

"You'll be fine Ruth." Not needing her jumbled thoughts to leave her head in order to know them.

"That's just the thing Harry; I don't think it will be. Ros is-"

"Ros is Ros."Harry said, firmly, "It's in her nature to side with her paranoia over her sense. She's insecure, but that does not mean she has good reason for it."

"I think she does Harry..." she said, quietly, "If she's right, if I-"

"She's not. Ros may be a great number of things, and she's an excellent officer, but she's not the most trusting and she underestimates the abilities of those around her." Ruth did not look too reassured by this and so he added, "Besides, Lucas says she has a concussion, she's more irritable than usual apparently, I wouldn't worry about it..."

"Well that'll be that then." She said, with a weak smile.

"You'll be fine, and afterwards-"

"Don't."

"What?"

"Do this..." she said, her eyes burning as brightly as her cheeks as she broke the understanding eye contact between them.

"Ruth I wasn't, I was only going to-"

"We both know what you were going to do Harry."

"I'm sorry." He waited a moment and said, "We have to talk about this." At the same time she said,

"I have to go..."

"Ruth, please-"

"No Harry...We have to talk but, but not now..."

She left the office and ran into Ros; this did nothing to improve the mood of either of them,

"Finished checking Harry's blood pressure?" she enquired, tartly,

"Let's go." Ruth replied shortly, heading for the pods, muttering under her breath, "You sure it's not more serious than a concussion?"

Lucas caught her eye and her words, smiling faintly he murmured, "Not developed 'Ros-deafness' yet? It's a blessing and a curse." He tentatively squeezed her shoulders and said softly, "You'll be fine Ruth."

The four of them were gathered together in the Home Secretary's office waiting for the diplomats with him bobbing around the desk behind them until Ros had snarled at him to either, "Piss yourself, or sit down, just stop hovering like a bloody mother hen whose chicks have fallen in the Thames."

He fortunately chose the latter option, however, to Ros' irritation, the effects of her suggestion were reversed a few minutes later when he jumped to his feet as though electrocuted in response to the door being knocked and opened.

"Twitchy little bunny isn't he?" Ros muttered to Lucas out of the corner of her mouth

"You have that effect on people..." he told her with a grin as the Home Secretary almost sprawled on the floor at their feet in his hurry for the door.

They watched as the diplomats filed through the door and the Home Secretary launched into a long-winded monologue welcoming them to Britain and explaining the purpose of the aides behind him, all of them feeling their faces burning with the effort of plastering false smiles across their faces for such a prolonged period of time. As the Home Secretary informed the parties that the aides had been given the authority and responsibility of the British government to provide them with anything they needed during the talks, just as all of them felt that their duty to their new delegations was to smother the Home Secretary, he paused, irritated by the necessity of breathing, and brought them back to Earth as they realised they were now needed to _do _something,

"Mr. Kenneth Williams." The Home Secretary said, gesturing to the British Prime Minister "and Mademoiselle Sabelle Dorè," the French, "May I present, Liam Ford?" he nodded towards Lucas.

Stepping forward, Lucas clasped hands briefly with the British Prime Minister and the members of his cabinet considered senior enough to attend these high profile talks, carefully slipping the trackers on the inside of watch straps, or the occasional cufflink.

"Pleasure Prime Minister." He said, with a small smile, distracting the politician by forcing him to meet his intense blue eyes while they exchanged pleasantries.

As the British delegation moved back politely and allowed the French party to move forwards so Lucas could introduce himself to them in turn, Lucas' eye was caught by the French Prime Minister.

She cut an impressive figure and it had been more than her surprising youth that had caused her to be the source of attention both from the media and the foreign diplomats. Tall and slim with sharp, striking features, her eyes made even more prominent by the fact that her blonde hair had been drawing back from her face, their intense green colour giving her a strange, exotic beauty making her instantly desirable. Her looks often concealed the intelligence and cunning beneath the pretty packaging, something that she knew and used perfectly.

She was the last member of her party that Lucas greeted and to his annoyance, the watch on her sallow wrist was composed of a delicate silver bracelet, its large loops did not lend themselves to the slim trackers and to his alarm it slipped out from under the slick watch face.

Watching as their cover tumbled to the floor, he hastily allowed the thick sheaf of files to fall to the floor at her feet.

"Oh, I am so sorry...No, no please, let me, it's fine really, I can only apologise."

Crouching down and feigning nerves as she bent to help him, retrieving the tracker under cover of gathering up the papers and impulsively slipping it behind the heel of her shoe. Straightening up he thanked her and mumbled,

"I'm very sorry mademoiselle." Anxiously avoiding her gaze.

"Do not worry yourself, monsieur Ford, it was an honest mistake." She said, imperiously, her voice falling pleasantly on his ears, a strange melodic quality to it.

He flicked his eyes towards hers, momentarily smiling faintly, something she fleetingly returned.

Lucas moved back to the desk and Ros delicately informed him,

"In the interests of international relations, it may be best if you could bring yourself to _avoid _sleeping with the French Prime Minister while she's here, tempting as it may be."

"Don't worry...I had my eye on the Russian PM anyway." He shot back with a smirk and a wink.

"Speak of the devil." Ros murmured, having no time to say anything else as the Home Secretary began introducing Sofia as Kate Ford to the American and Russian representatives.

The American President crossed the room in two large bounds in his eagerness to make Sofia's acquaintance, he was a large, boyish faced man named Robert Crowe and when he reached her apart from being alarmed at his inability to remain still, she was confident that because of the exuberance of his handshake, the tracker she had delicately placed under the enormous cufflink at his wrist would ping off and lodge itself in one of the hideous, pretentious paintings dotted around the room, however she was impressed to find that it remained stubbornly in place under the thick leather.

As Sofia turned to face the Russian Prime Minister, her first thought was incredulity; she was the polar opposite of Tigger the bouncy President.

Kalina Myskin was older than Sabelle Dorè, but still young for the position she held. Where the US President was large, loud and light; she was far more reserved and spoke in a voice barely above a whisper with a soft accent. Her hair and eyes were dark, both almost black, in striking contrast to her pale, ghostly skin and while her features were more understated than those of her French counterpart, her quiet beauty could not be questioned.

Her material reservations caused headache for Sofia however when she realised that she did not have the luxury of watches of cufflinks to attach her tracker to as she wore almost no jewellery, save a silver pin at her chest.

Knowing that, ideally, the tracker had to last for the duration of the talks and could not be put on a simple item of clothing that would most likely not even make it to the first day, she took a risk and said, "May I?" as she held the delicate pin between her fingers.

"Saint Catherine of Alexandria?" Sofia said, quietly, aware of the focus of the other woman's dark gaze, "A very strong woman..." she murmured, holding the soft, hypnotic eyes as she placed the tracker on the back.

"That she was..." she replied, dipping her head graciously, a movement mirrored by Sofia as she returned to the others.

"Prime Minister Akash Singh, and Premier Hui Sūn, Ms Helen Bond." The Home Secretary said, as Ruth stepped forwards tentatively, greeting Hui Sūn, the Chinese premier first in his native language, to which he responded in kind with obvious delight, looking impressed, completely distracting him as she slipped the tracker onto the small detailed cufflink that twinkled temptingly, inches from her finger as they clasped hands.

Hui Sūn was small and round, but the eyes that glinted beneath the folds of skin making up his cheeks contained more intelligence and cunning than a rabid wolf. He would not be taken for a fool and his appearance was as deceiving as Sabelle Dorè.

The opposite was true of the Indian Prime Minister, Akash Singh, he too grasped Ruth's hand with both of his own, making it easy for her to place the tracker on the enormous watch slapped unashamedly across his wrist. He was taller than his Chinese counterpart, but far easier to read, his open features revealing every emotion that played across his face. Contrary to popular belief, this was an advantage as it gave him the appearance of being something that few politicians could claim; trustworthy.

"And last but not least." The Home Secretary announced dramatically as Ruth gratefully took her place between Lucas and Sofia once more. "Ms Sara West, I present you to Prime Minister Shakil Zardari, and Leader Ki Jīnyù."

Ros stepped forwards to greet the two people who she was to become intimately familiar with over the next few days, sizing the up as they walked towards her. She had no problem fitting trackers to either of them; however she would not willingly have played poker with either of them.

The North Korean leader, Ki Jīnyù, was first to approach her. Unusually tall, his intense black eyes seemed to look straight through her while revealing nothing about themselves. Curiously the voice he spoke with was extremely soft and gentle, she felt sure he was lulling her into a false sense of security, like a boa constrictor gently draping itself around her shoulders to ease her into her dreams before throttling her in her sleep.

Likewise, the Pakistani Prime Minister wore a smile similar to one he would wear while dining with her, knowing that he had poisoned her wine. He was a small man with thin lips and cruel scars, almost hidden by his thick black hair, but not quite, the faint, half-forgotten memories that would back up her belief he would have no problems slitting the throat of anyone who crossed him.

Introductions made, Ros slunk back to her place and watched as the Home Secretary thanked them all for coming and bade them a good night's sleep in preparation for the days of what he called, 'constructive debates' and what Ros termed, 'back-stabbing catfights' ahead as they filed gratefully from his office, hopefully none the wiser to the danger they could be in.

As they gathered together in the foyer Lucas asked, "What did you think?" to no-one in particular.

Sofia answered with a wolfish grin.

"Let the games begin..."

A/N: Hopefully you managed to bear with me on this one, this chapter's more of a scene setting one for the ones relating to the talks coming up (that I am, incidentally, terrified of!) The Harry/Ruth scene I'm not sure of, it's not my usual style of writing but we learn by doing so constructive criticism is asked for here :) As always, thank you for reading and reviewing!


	20. Day 1-Monsters Under The Table

**Chapter 20**

Day 1: Monsters Under The Table

Ironically, when it came to it, Lucas and Ros ended up sitting either side of the wardrobe that concealed the Priest's Hole they had hidden in on their ill-fated break in of the house. on one end of the table while Ruth and Sofia sat against the decorative wall opposite them on the other side of the table.

They watched patiently as the diplomats settled themselves around the polished slab of oak shaped into the table in the centre of the room, already eyeing each other suspiciously.

"Do you think they'll all play nicely?" Lucas muttered to Ros undercover of the chairs being pulled out and the buzz of casual conversation that filled the room.

"Do you think I'm a bloody fairy princess?" came the predictably irony-laced remark.

He smirked and watched as the Home Secretary got to his feet, killing the hushed conversations.

"Well, first of all, I would like to thank you all for agreeing to participate in these talks, i am sure that the next few days will bring about a stable agreement and a lasting bond of trust between our nations."

"Optimistic isn't he?"Sofia muttered to no-one in particular.

"'Peace Talk Virgin' springs more comfortably to mind."

"And now." he continued, "I find it only fitting to ask Ms Myskin if as it was she who was so instrumental in the conception of these talks, if she would consent to give us a small introduction."

This was news to the Russian Prime Minister, who got tentatively to her feet as the Home Secretary sat down she flashed him a look of mingled curiosity and suspicion, before saying in her hypnotic whisper.

"Thank you Home Secretary." she paused a moment, dipping her head graciously in his direction before continuing, "I would also like to extend my thanks to you all for joining here today. In these uncertain times, it is good that we can come together in this way and in this aim; our world has changed much. Fifty years ago world wars dragged on for years and claimed millions of lives; today, with the weapons we all possess, a similar war would result in the same death toll in minutes. I am glad therefore, that we have all agreed to respect our past protect our future by coming together for peace."

She sat down and the small smattering of applause that threatened at her words was quickly stifled by the venomous response of the North Korean Leader, Jīnyū,

"Have we?"

"Well these are peace talks you know, so I wouls presume so." The American President said genially, while his eyes narrowed in response to the other man's words.

"Peace is overrated and unattainable indefinitely, the world will always com e to war, and none of us can truly believe that we can stop this, so I ask again, why are we here?"

"I agree, peace is not infinite, but we are all here to protect it while we can, and if you are indicating that you are not; then I find that it is _your _motives that should be questioned." Sabelle Dorè hissed in response to the deliberately antagonistic words of the North Korean Leader.

Jīnyū looked impressed by her reasoning, while she had leapt to the offensive and had directly countered his words, which had been designed to illicit this kind of response, she had not attacked his argument in the way he had expected,

"At this moment in time, I am here for the same reason as everyone else in this room, even if they will not openly admit it, to see where our loyalties lie..."

"Our loyalties all lie in the same place," Kenneth Williams, the British Prime Minister put in, "Does North Korea want war?"

"Of course not."

"Well then, you now know where our loyalties lie, we are not here to discuss formal alliances, we are here to negotiate a treaty limiting the use of nuclear weapons, so let us discuss that."

"Precisely." Hui Sūn proclaimed comfortably from his chair.

"All that matters is that we share a common interest, none of us want war, hence the reason we are all here, I agree with Mr. Williams, that is what we should be discussing." Akash Singh, the Indian PM put in.

"One moment if you please ladies and gentlemen," Broke in the oily voice of Shakil Zardari, the Pakistani Prime Minister whom Ros had been expecting to grease the conversation far sooner than this, "I find myself agreeing with Leader Jīnyū, it _does _matter, and now wonder why the one voice we have not heard from is the one that called us all here in the first place, Ms Myskin, perhaps you should explain, why did Russia feel the need to schedule these impromptu talks? Does she merely feel threatened in these times by the growing number of nuclear weapons? Is it this a political move to appease her people? Or is there something more that she is not sharing? Something that she ought to if she does indeed want to 'protect our future'?"

Despite themselves, the leaders all turned to Kalina Myskin, murmuring among their parties all of them now suspicious over the issue that Zardari had smugly raised.

"Slimy bugger isn't he?" Ruth observed, irritated,

"Quite...I felt the need to bleach my hand after our brief encounter yesterday." Ros agreed drily,

"I don't know what, but she better do something or these talks will be over before they even begin." Lucas pointed out, watching the restless diplomats anxiously.

As if in response to this, Myskin began speaking, instantly silencing her fellow diplomats,

"'What makes life dreary is the want of a motive', and I do indeed find your _quest _for a motive dreary. If you wish to spend all of your time searching for hidden meanings and half-truths that have no bearing on anything, then I do not wish to spend it with you. I did not come here to ask why or how or what, I came here to _do _something. To do something about the pit of secrets that we find ourselves in, something that your ridiculous words only evidence further. For too long we have sat back and done nothing while the world descends into chaos around us, I cannot therefore consider these talks to be 'impromptu' when they are decades overdue. If you do not feel that they are necessary, or that they are only being done for appearances, no-one has tied you to your chair Minister, so please, go, and stop wasting my time."

"Well, she's got balls if nothing else." Ruth muttered, impressed by the younger woman's impassioned words.

"Close your mouth." Ros murmured dismissively to Lucas.

"Bless him, I think he's in love." Sofia added mercilessly, "Dark, beautiful, powerful, and she quotes things...His perfect woman."

"Don't say I didn't warn you." he smirked to Ros, refusing to rise to the sizeable bait they had tossed him.

"Consider _this _due warning, her bed, remains free of you."

Nobody moved and nobody spoke after Kalina Myskin's monologue and so she felt compelled to fill the silence left in the wake of her bluff,

"Five of us are already bound by an existing treaty limiting our nuclear arms, three of us currently are not, and so I propose, before we begin talking specifics and numbers, that we talk general opinions. I would ask you all now then, in light of recent ill thought out remarks then, who is willing to at least consider negotiation of their nuclear weapons programme?"

"Well I would have thought that our mere attendance implied that we were at least willing to give the matter consideration." Singh pointed out, with characteristic frankness.

"I think not." Sabelle Dorè replied flatly, "As our North Korean friends have implied, we all seem to be a little uncertain here."

"The implications of attendance may not be so clear cut Ms Dorè, but what your words imply to us could not be more obvious!" Jīnyū snarled across the table.

"Let us put it to a vote." Hui Sūn said evenly, "At least get something decided before lunch, a simple yes or no on a piece of paper would suffice I think."

Ruth dutifully took the hint and provided Sūn with several rough squares of paper to use as ballot slips.

"Only whether or not we are _willing _to negotiate caps, not whether we _will_." Zardari clarified insistently as he accepted his paper.

"Of course, " Dorè said impatiently, "A little yes on a piece of scrap paper is hardly a binding legal contract Zardari, relax." She tittered irritatingly,

The sheets of paper were collected and, for one reason or another that they would surely have squabbled over had they not been in the process of dismissing themselves for lunch, every nation voted yes, leaving them all in a relatively reasonable mood as they were gently ushered through to the larger lunch hall by members of the catering team.

"Only politicians could agree to meet somewhere to discuss something and then take a bloody vote to see if they were actually prepared to discuss it!" Ros growled, swiping a glass of champagne that swooped under her nose, "Whoever decided to serve alcohol deserves a bloody peace prize..."

"Ah well, it wouldn't all have been for nothing, I'm sure they get free air travel, do a spot of sightseeing, wouldn't have been a completely wasted trip." Sofia said, airily,

"It's been a bloody wasted morning." Ros fumed, sipping at her champagne.

"I wouldn't say it was entirely wasted," Ruth said, unwisely sticking her head in the lion's mouth that was Ros' fury when argued against in this mood, "What do you think of the country leaders?"

"I feel like a nursery teacher wrestling with a group of stroppy three year old." Ros replied irritably, "If these are the most powerful people on Earth than God help the rest of us mere mortals."

"I don't know, I think there's something brewing between the North Korean's and our American cousins." Sofia said, more helpfully,

"You _always _think there's something brewing." Lucas pointed out,

"Because there generally is. What makes you think that Sofia?" Ruth countered,

"I don't know why, they seem a little possessive over one another." Sofia said, her eyes flicking towards Jīnyū, who at that moment happened to be engrossed in deep conversation with the American President, Crowe.

"Shall we check back in with Harry and Tariq?" Ruth suggested after a lull in the conversation, "See if they have anything on our insider."

"Not sure how much they'll have, we said more during the talks, if you're not a world leader there doesn't seem to be much room for you, they could have neon signs announcing their affiliation with Hiroshima and we'd still struggle identifying them." Lucas said bluntly,

"Whichever bit of Ros you've stolen, give it back, the world can't cope with two of you." Sofia informed him,

Remarkably however, Ros agreed with Ruth,

"For the sake of Harry's sanity, we will." she said, dialling the number and connecting the comms they were all wired with the allow them to converse over the table.

...

Harry sauntered from his office to the cupboard that some coffee-crazed Section D officer, who would only ever be remembered for just that, had had the bright idea to convert into something that may have passed for a staff room if it had accommodated more than the two people that could perch on the table that had been jammed into it. As a result it had affectionately called a walk-in coffee vending machine and was, all-in-all, a very welcome addition to The Grid, as the haggard officers of which seemed to mainly run on caffeine and fresh air.

"Coffee?" Tariq asked as Harry rounded the corner and jumped when he found him holding out the coffee pot he was in the process of helping himself to.

"Bloody Hell." Harry snarled under his breath, thrusting his mug in Tariq's general direction by means of answering.

"I didn't know it offended you so." Tariq grinned, filling their cups.

"I think this is a ruse to make me lose my marbles-" Harry growled,

"Haven't you already?"

"Not quite...There are only two of us on this bloody floor, you're trying to tell me that our coffee clocks coincidentally synced?"

"Coincidence has nothing to do with it, I needed a break." Tariq replied grimly, "Every time I close my eyes I see little coloured dots dancing mockingly in front of them..."

"Any joy from these dancing dots?" Harry enquired, sipping his coffee which was, shockingly, something that the food standards agency may actually have considered approving as safe for human consumption.

"Nope, our little blobs are careful, they're all behaving themselves."

"Dam."

"What were you hoping for? Ammonia in closets and secret drug deals done under the table?"

"Give it time..." Harry said darkly,

"On that note, it's lunchtime-" Tariq began eagerly,

"You've just eaten." Harry said, severely,

"I know that, it's _their _lunchtime, if any worms are crawling out of apples it will be now."

"Then why are you still here?"

"What-" Tariq said, clearly wrong-footed.

"Early bird Tariq..." Harry smirked airily,

"Right...Yes..."

Harry allowed himself twenty minutes of the talk's lunchtime to enjoy his coffee, one of his few and rare indulgences, before going to visit Tariq and his dancing dots.

"I've got three potentials for you." he told him happily as he entered,

"I hope there's more reason to this than you jabbing a pen at the monitor." Harry said suspiciously,

"Shockingly, I do." he said sardonically, "These three, " he highlighted and enlarged three of the dots causing the screen to their spit profile pages at them, showing two men and a woman "Everyone in the delegations flitted about a bit and left the main body, didn't give me much, you know the usual gossip, nosy, cigarette, quickie in the cleaner's cupboard, anyway, these were the only ones who avoided the cameras while going wherever they were going.

"Really?" Harry said, listening now, "It's like Khrushchev's Big Brother House in there."

"Exactly, they know the blind spots."

"For once their caution is to our advantage."

"Problem is we have one insider and three potentials. In theory it could have been accidental, none of them went very far...How do we choose?"

"How indeed? _Our _insiders will just have to show us how to throw the dice."

At that moment the phone went, the comm connection implying that it was Ros,

"You scare me sometimes..." Tariq mumbled as Harry answered it,

"Ros?"

"Harry, how are you getting on with our Mechanical Merlin?"

"Better than expected, he makes better coffee than you lot, yourselves?"

"Our heads are intact, as are the politicians'...For now."

"About as well as can be expected then?" he paused a moment before saying, "We have the names of three potential insiders for you all to enjoy surreptitiously digging in to this afternoon."

"Really?" Ros asked, sounding mildly impressed,

"I take it from your tone that you haven't got a thing?"

"And they said you weren't intuitive..."

"Indeed they did, well as I know you're tired and your psychic powers are not working too well, I'll have Tariq send you their details, briefly however, you have Alexy Dastik, Russia, Luke Evans, America, and Camille Alice, French."

"Right, I'll tell the others, I have to go, they're leading us back inside now, see you on the other side, if this doesn't descend into a bloodbath by tea-time."

"Your eternal optimism never fails to inspire me Ros..."

The afternoon the talks progressed much as they had done that morning; not at all. Several arguments, rash comments, broken pride and much offence later, they had broken up for the day, the Home Secretary's talk virginity well and truly lost along with the accompanying optimism as he said, without much confidence that, "now they were over the hurdle of the first day, he was sure that 'the rest of the talks would run as smoothly as a jazz piano'."

"If he's an idiot, he shouldn't be allowed out in public unsupervised, and if he's a liar, he shouldn't be allowed out in public without a warning label..." Lucas observed as they all began to file irritably from the room.

An imperious tap to Lucas' shoulder caused him to turn and Ros to bite her tongue,

"Liam?" Sabelle Dorè purred throatily, "Would you please meet me in my room?"

Lucas stared after her as she turned and walked up the stairs with a superiority that would have put Jools Siviter to shame.

"If she asks you to prostitute yourself for your country, please don't, it's just tacky the second time around..." Ros informed him as he made to leave,

"Don't worry..."

"Oh but I do, there's nothing more dangerous than a spy that's not getting any..."

"...There's you."

...

"Liam? I was wondering if you could help me with a slight discrepancy, something I'm having trouble with?" she said in a tone that implied it was not a question.

"Of course mademoiselle Dorè," he replied obligingly,

"Strip." she said, flatly,

Lucas stared at her in disbelief as Ros said "Lucas..." warningly in his ear,

"I'm sorry mademoiselle, but I do not think that I-"

"I do not think _I _was giving you the option." she snarled, two large, well muscled body guards caught him unawares as they tripped him and pinned him to the floor on his knees as she advanced on him with a thin knife.

"Lucas!" Ros said, more insistently,

"I want to know..." she said, threateningly, advancing on him and using the knife to cleanly slit open the back of his shirt, causing it to peel apart and fall to his side like the wings of a butterfly, exposing the pale skin of his back, before she hissed

"Why an aid for the British Government has Russian prison tattoos."

A/N: I am asking you to forgive any errors in this as I have absolutely no experience in these kind of talks and this entire chapter comes to you straight from brain to page, written purely on instinct. (hopefully that's not too obvious!)


	21. Day 2-Monsters Inside Us

**Chapter 21**

Day 2: Monsters Inside Us

Dorè lightly traced the eight inked churches on Lucas' back as he closed his eyes in despair.

"Shit." Ros hissed in his ear, knowing he was most likely blown.

"We all have a past..." Lucas murmured

"Indeed, and people with your past do not get your future." She snarled, slashing through the air with the knife in anger, accidentally catching his shoulder.

"I think we both know strings can be pulled in these circumstances..."

"Easy Lucas..."" Ros muttered, wondering where he was going with this as Dorè turned on him, snarling,

"What do you mean by that?"

"I think you know..."

"You be careful now Mr. Ford...You do not understand what you are saying..."

"Lucas, what the Hell are you doing?" Ros spat, petrified,

"Everyone has things in their past that they would rather forget; when they come back to haunt us in our future, it's usually better for everyone involved that they too forget...I think we both understand what I mean by that..."

"Do not try and play me Mr-"

"Oh I'm not trying to play you, I could only do that if I'm bluffing...But if I know...Are you willing to take that risk? History is not often as forgiving as we would like it to be..."

She considered him softly as Ros reassuringly informed Lucas, "I hope to God that wasn't a plea for information Lucas because I don't have much at my disposal to trade for your bloody stupid life right now, you're on your own..."

Dorè swore softly and barked in rapid French to one of her body guards, too quickly for Lucas' broken French skills to translate, before she bent down and whispered dangerously,

"Who are you?"

"I am an aide for the British government, in order to-"

"No, not who you say you are. Who. Are. You?"

He watched her carefully, his next words making Ruth gasp and Ros bury her face in her hands in despair, "If you try to find out the answer to that, then you will also find your secrets splashed across the front pages of every major newspaper in this country..."

"You are lying!" she spat turning away from him dismissively, "You have no proof-"

"Don't I? You're sure about that? People have an unfortunate habit of remembering things they shouldn't unless they're given very good reason to forget..."

She swore softly once more and muttered to herself under her breath before taking a shirt from her body guard and thrusting it into his chest. As he peeled of the remnants of the one she had ruined, she leant closer to him and breathed,

"Be careful, you will only push me so far..." pressing her lips against his ear she hissed, "A canary cannot sing if its throat has been slit..."

"But if it starts...It's hard to cut the throats of the others..." Lucas said, they stared intensely into one another's eyes for a fraction of a second, attempting to read the other before Lucas took control of the situation, buttoning the new shirt and standing.

She watched him leave the room, twirling the slim knife between her fingers as she did so. As he turned to quietly close the door he saw her deliberately wipe the smear of blood that adorned the silver blade on the torn remains of his shirt.

...

"Are you alright?" Ros asked, roughly as he joined them at the car,

"Fine." He said shortly,

He slipped into the passenger seat, at last allowing his protesting, painfully tense muscles to relax as the adrenaline finally drained from them.

"Well?" she demanded when an explanation was not immediately forthcoming.

"Little tip I picked up from chess games in prison, when you know you've done something your opponent can make use of, instead of trying to cover it up with your next move, anticipate theirs instead...Applies in the real world too..."

"You already had your eye on the Sugar Plum Fairy?" she asked, starting the car.

"Half an eye, I didn't think she was going to say anything after she ignored it this morning, I saw her clock the tattoo on my wrist, she put two and two together and got Russia..."

"Clever bitch..."

"Quite...I indulged myself by taking the time to learn a few of mademoiselle Dorè's dirty little secrets, every politician has them, else they wouldn't be politicians...It's truly incredible what drunk, overworked, pissed of PA's can be charmed into divulging..."

"And?" Ros asked, irritably,

Lucas smirked and said, "You're expecting her to be a secret member of the FSB aren't you?"

"I'm expecting something..."

"The curses and blessings of being a politician...Go to a charity event for sick children gets you a dozen votes...Go to a strip club as a prostitute in your youth, gets you professionally executed by your own party..."

"She did not? Snow White's a hooker?" Ros asked delightedly,

"Evidently...According to her very tipsy PA, she was 'paid in secrets'. Several of her old clients are now high ranking cabinet members, apparently blackmail works fairly well in making politicians put up and shut up..."

"Buys votes and silence...The cunning, manipulative..." she trailed off before saying, satisfied, "Well, I don't think we'll be having to worry about Snow White and her seven dwarves in the near future...If she bought what you were selling and doesn't slit your throat in your sleep of course..."

...

Sabelle Dorè flounced past Lucas without looking at him as she took her seat at the table the next morning, looking as superior and unconcerned as ever,

"Well it doesn't look like she wants to rip your clothes up so I'd say that's a good start." Ros murmured to Lucas, watching Dorè settling herself comfortably at the table, with distaste.

"Nice to know your personal thoughts on the whereabouts of my clothes..."

"I know far too much about your previous relationships to have different ones..."

He smirked but said nothing as the Home Secretary stood to welcome them all to Day 2 of what Harry had now affectionately termed, 'The Mickey Mouse Club', his irritating bounce returned and switched to its highest setting this morning. S

"Whatever that man's taking, I want some..." Ruth muttered, watching in optimism as he gave his first pep-talk of the day, detailing everything from 'mountains scaled' to 'rollercoasters yet to ride'.

"For you or for Harry?" Ros asked, tartly,

Ruth mockingly considered this for a fraction of a second before shooting back, "Both. "With a smirk.

The tension between the talks participants continued to increase but, miraculously, they made more progress than they had the day before; for all their squabbling, it seemed as though the leaders had all realised that they were, in actual fact, there to prevent the outbreak of war as opposed to giving themselves reason to start one.

Two hours in and half-way through a heated debate that solely involved the Americans and North Koreans throwing arguments back and forth while the other diplomats contented themselves with pretending they were attending a political tennis match, concerning the appropriate number of nuclear warheads a country needed and whether or not this should be, hypothetically, affected by landmass or population, Sofia hissed under her breath,

"You sneaky bastards..."

"What?" Ros asked, sharply,

"Our American and North Korean friends aren't at each other's throats for the sake of being at each other's throats, they're covering the dodgy deals they're doing under the table...Or more accurately, over it."

"What do you mean?" Ruth asked softly, while studying the respective parties.

"What the green-eyed monster two seats to the left of Jīnyù and the blonde twat directly behind Crowe..."

They were all quiet for a few minutes until Lucas laughed softly and Ruth said, incredulously,

"Are they...?"

"Yes they are..." Sofia said, smiling smugly, "The ones supposedly taking notes of the meeting scribe messages from their respective leaders then feeds them to the translator who sends them across the table where they are received, translated and replied to. Like smoke signals without the health risks..." she said, smirking at their ingenuity, "As far as I can tell, so far they've agreed that they both want the same things, higher numbers of warheads than are currently proposed. Simple enough plan, one sows the seeds, a certain number, the other argues against, eventually they'll ask the others to choose, roughly splitting the group, then when it actually comes down to it, one of them will jump ship at the last minute, causing confusion amongst their erstwhile supporters, and, like the adorable little lemmings that they are, the rest will follow and we'll end up with a room full of politicians drowning in their own stupidity...Who said that spies weren't present at these talks? This is brilliant..."

"You can sign?" Ruth asked, as the others pondered this.

"Yes, my grandmother was deaf, I was fascinated by it and started studying different variations, what they're doing is fairly basic, their grammar is horrible, but it works..."

"Well we couldn't have political negotiations without some good old Cold War skulduggery..." Ros said airily.

"What do we do?" Ruth asked softly,

"Nothing. Nothing we can do." Ros said dismissively,

"We can't just let them-"

"Look Ruth, save chopping their fingers off I can't think of anything, if you want to pull them aside and politely ask them if they'd mind awfully be my guest, beyond that we leave it alone, anything else will be more trouble than their worth. We're not here to make these talks work, just the President's heart, if we tried to save politicians from their own stupidity every time then we would all end up in serious need of professional help."

"Besides, if things continue as they are we won't need to worry about Crowe doing any deals under the table as his insides will be inconveniently on the outside, something that's looking increasingly likely. "Lucas pointed out grimly.

...

"Harry, I've got something!" Tariq called, not even bothering to stand up,

The Grid, as it turned out, carried sound exceptionally well when it was empty of absorbent officers, so much so, that, after harry had irritably pointed out that he could hear Tariq slurping coffee from his office, they had abandoned all methods of sophisticated communication in favour of simply yelling across the room at one another.

"If Sabelle Dorè has been flashing the PM over the prawn cocktail in order to make him agree with her then there really is no hope for this country-" Harry began, wandering over into the tech suite,

"No, Alexy Dastik, one of our potentials? I've caught him on camera collecting a dead drop..."

"What?" Harry said, sharply.

Tariq pulled up a blurry shot of Dastik removing something from the underside of the bench he was sitting on, seemingly smoking,

"This was the best camera angle we could get; something I'm sure he knew...We can't actually see what he takes but I don't think it was chewing gum..."

"How long do the talks have this morning before the lunch break?"

"Almost two and a half hours, they had an early start."

"Get me Ros."

"Do we think that's him? Dastik's our insider?"

"We definitely think it's a possibility, pull them all bar Sofia, if we decide to do something about our little Russian infestation I want her kept close to it."

"Won't that blow their covers?" Tariq asked, pausing with the phone to his ear,

"Maybe, maybe not, it's a risk we have to take, cover it by pulling other random British workers, call it a routine security check, they've won scratch-cards, whatever you feel like, get creative, but I want them back here in less than thirty minutes..."

...

"So we're basing _everything _on a grainy CCTV video that _might _show a dead drop?" Ruth asked, incredulously,

"No, we're basing everything on the risk involved in making a dead drop in that place, that house makes Fort Know look about as well guarded as a strip club in Russia..." Lucas countered,

"'Risk' is exactly what it is." Ruth retorted, "We're going to take out a foreign diplomat because we're getting a bit desperate?"

"No, we're going to take out a member of an extremist group because he is attempting to aid the assassination of the American President in our back garden, something that looks fairly bad for us." Ros shot back.

"We haven't got anything to suggest-"

"Haven't got anything to suggest what? That he's got a beautiful singing voice? No. That he poses a threat to this country? Yes."

"No we don't." Ruth said, flatly, braver than most in the room, "We have something on a security camera that _might _be a dead drop, and even if it is," she continued loudly over Ros' protestations, "We have no idea that it's related to this, it could be drugs, money, lovers, we don't know."

"Occam's Razor." Lucas said, softly, "The simplest answer is usually the right one, and right now the simplest answer that explains why Alexy Dastik is avoiding our cameras, fondling benches, and also why Artem Salko knew about this, is that he is involved with the extremist group Hiroshima."

"But-"

"Harry, you need to make a decision." Ros said, cutting over Ruth, "We can argue about this all day, we're running out of time."

Harry pressed lifted the phone in the centre of the table and connected them to Sofia's comms,

"Morning plague-" Harry began, neutrally,

"What the Hell is going on?" Sofia snarled, in the midst of the talks her three colleagues had been summoned away leaving her sitting like a lemon wondering what was happening as no-one thought to inform her.

"Our Russian problem has become more serious than we first anticipated." Harry said, delicately, "We need you to deal with it over lunch."

"Oh do you now? And might I ask _why _our mild throat infection has suddenly gone viral? What have we got on it?"

"Enough..." Harry said, evasively,

"Shit." Sofia snarled, "If you want me to start playing assassin you need to give me more than that Harry, _what _exactly have you got on him? I am _not _going back to prison for you on a hunch!" she spat.

"CCTV footage of a dead drop and a miraculously accurate allergy to our tapes."

"That's it?" she snarled, "You want me to kill him based on sticking something somewhere and being a little camera shy?"

"If this man is working for Hiroshima he is our best chance at stopping this attack." Harry said,

"And if he's not then he's my best chance of being thrown in a cell and forcing the Russians to declare war on Britain!" Sofia snarled,

"Only if you get caught." Ros pointed out helpfully,

"God I didn't know we were this desperate, Harry this is insane-"

"No, this is an order." He said, flatly, "Get to Alexy Dastik and be back in your seat for desert."

"Fuck...You'll need to give me a diversion...Get him up to their suite." She said bitterly,

"How do you propose we do that?"

"You're all clever, clever people and if you can all figure this to be the best way out of this mess well then you can bloody well figure out how to clear the damn thing up."

...

Sofia twitched her way through the rest of that afternoon's talks and rose with the rest as lunch was called, staying close to Dastik.

Ten minutes in to their allotted hour, a waitress approached Dastik and whispered something in his ear; he in turn leant in to speak to Kalina Myskin,

"Please, I have an urgent phone call to take, they are on a line, may I please use your suite?" he asked, quietly, it had been established over the last few days that Dastik was close to Myskin, closer than any of them were comfortable with.

"Of course Alexy...Something wrong?" she asked, concerned,

"My mother, I can't, I must,"

"Of course, of course, go..."

Seizing her chance Sofia knocked Myskin, causing the reading glasses that had been balanced precariously in her pocket to tumble to the floor where they were promptly stepped on by Robert Crowe.

"I am so sorry Ms Myskin, he send bending to pick them up and blanching at the damage his heavy step had done to the delicate spectacles.

Sofia hovered close by and as Myskin said, "Would you-"

She stepped in swiftly and said, "Of course Prime Minister.

"Thank you, they are on my cabinet."

"Thank you, I will be as fast as I can." Sofia promised, slipping quickly from the room she jogged upstairs, fiddling with the pins she had stuck in her hair to keep it in a tight bun. They were painted black but were made of strong, light metal and the points were like snake's teeth.

Feeling anticipation claw at her stomach she inserted the key card into the reader outside Myskin's room and stepped soundlessly into the room, the long, thin metal pin in curled beneath her fingers. Dastik was on the phone, his back to her, angrily bellowing down the line at whoever had taken responsibility for informing him of whatever story they had invented involving his mother.

Swiftly crossing the room she deftly stabbed the pin into the back of his neck, inserting it between the bones of his spine and skull, severing the spinal cord causing him to choke and crumple to the floor at her feet.

Withdrawing the pin she wiped it clean calmly on a napkin on the table before slowly and coldly winding her hair back into a knot and inserting the pins into it to keep it in place. She was intending on retrieving Myskin's glasses from her cabinet and returning downstairs when she heard the lift at the end of the corridor announcing an unexpected visitor.

Darting from the room she closed the door as quietly and as slowly as she dared before pretending to approach it from the other end of the corridor, hearing voices coming from the lift, she inserted the key card back into the lock and re-entered the room before letting out a piercing scream that caused the meandering footsteps to run towards the source of the commotion.

She waited until the two large Russians almost drew level with her before falling into their bewildered arms in a dead faint.

A/N: Thank you all for reading and reviewing, hopefully this is all going OK so far!


	22. Day 3-Monsters Chasing Rabbits

**Chapter 22**

Day 3-Monsters Chasing Rabbits

Sofia allowed herself to be carried and placed gently on a sofa by one of the burly Russians that had entered the room in response to her scream; the other had hurried from the room to fetch help.

Less than five minutes later, when Sofia had managed to sit up and had been presented with a cold glass of water, Myskin entered the room, followed by most of her party. She swore softly in Russian and closed her eyes, looking down at Alexy Dastik's body with sorrow etched across her face.

"What happened?" She asked quietly,

"I, I don't know...I came in here to, to fetch your glasses Miss and I, I..." she began shaking, tears sliding down her cheeks as the glass in her hand rocked so much that the icy liquid inside was beginning to slop out over her hands.

Kalina Msykin stepped forwards and placed her hands over Sofia's trembling ones, gently taking the glass of water from her hands and setting it on a table before saying,

"Please Miss Connor, Kate; please tell me what happened..."

"I, I can't I'm sorry...I don't know, I just came in and he was there and I..." she trailed off, unable to control her crying,

"Alright, it's alright..." she turned and spoke softly in Russian, "I want someone here who can find me answers...And I want this poor girl taken away, I can manage without her for one afternoon, if the _dogs _that are down there insist on going ahead..."

Sofia was led down to the foyer area and wrapped in a blanket and was met by Lucas,

"Are you alright?"

"Fine...Does that ever bother you?"

"What?"

"Killing people, doesn't it ever get to you...How little you care anymore..."

"We have to..."

"The ends justify the means, I know...Don't pull that crap on me Lucas..."

"I'm sorry...Do they suspect you?"

No, I'm just an innocent little aide, wrong place wrong time, Myskin sent me home, concerned about me..." she shook her head, "They'll never know, never know what we did, never know what kind of a monster I am...and I am the worst kind, not the kind that stalks nightmares and haunts dreams, I am one that kills unquestioningly, and then goes home for a cup of tea and Coronation Street...They'll never know the truth..." she said, quietly, "Do we? Do we _know_?"

"We're ninety per cent sure, sure enough to allow the talks to go ahead tomorrow, it's over Sofia..."

"It is far from over...Kalina Myskin will be difficult to convince back to that table, never mind agree with these people, all of whom she will suspect of having had something to do with Dastik, they were close, she won't let this go Lucas..."

"We're constructing a story now...She won't have a choice. Harry's going to charm her with his words."

"And here I thought the assassination attempt would be the greatest threat to these talks..."

* * *

Sofia settled herself in the briefing room, she had just finished giving her account of Dastik's murder and Myskin's return and words and she was now looking to them to discover what they were planning on doing with Alexy Dastik, and how they could convince Myskin to return to the negotiating table, the talks for that afternoon having been pushed back to allow her to make u her mind.

"I hope you're not planning on having him painted as a traitor, she won't buy it..."

"We're playing on an already established flaw of Alexy Dastik." Ruth said, spreading several bank statements across the table, "Greed and lack of control...Leads to a gambolling addiction that inevitably leads to massive debts."

"And we just happen to know how he planned to solve those, dealing drugs here in Britain...Though not quickly enough, he was lured to the hotel room and murdered for being unable to pay back his drug source, circles within circles, beginning and ending with the death of Dastik." Ros finished, spreading the ambiguous dead drop shot.

"So...Lucas is being cagey, I'll give you all a moment to try and digest that shock, what do we have on Dastik? Did I kill a drug dealer with gambolling debts? Or did I kill a psychotic member of an extremist group attempting to bring about a nuclear war?"

"The latter alternative is looking increasingly likely..." Lucas said

"Not you, someone who can give me a yes or a no. Believe it or not I took absolutely no pleasure in that and will only sleep slightly easier at nights if he's a nutcase, someone please-" Sofia said, bluntly, looking desperately at Ros, who obliged, sensing that Lucas would be in imminent danger if she did not.

"Yes. We got hold of his autopsy pictures-"

"Bloody Hell they didn't wait long, he'd still be warm..."

"We found this, on either side of his hips." Ros said, showing pictures of two small tattoos, one symbol on his left hip, the other on his right."

"It took me a while to find it but it's Japanese for-"

"War and Peace." Sofia said, quietly, "Fitting...It doesn't prove anything, but it's about the most concrete evidence we could have hoped for...Would have been nice if he had 'I support nuclear lunatics' tattooed across his chest, this will do...So, if we can get Kalina Myskin back to the table it looks as though these peace talks will be good, no pressure Harry..."

* * *

"Ms Myskin, I understand the horrible circumstances here but I really do think that you need to understand the delicate position these talks are in, and the power you hold in changing them-" Harry tried again, they had been going round in circles for some time and he was beginning to tire of it.

"You people, all the same, empty, dead inside...A man I have known for almost twenty years is murdered and you are all just telling me to be a good little girl and sit back down at the table, potentially with his killer." She spat, Harry had discovered in the twenty minutes he had already spent with her that the quiet Russian had quite a temper.

"Is that what you are concerned about? Dining with the devil?"

"Of course not, I would not be in politics if I were concerned about that...The devils at the table do not concern me Mr Pearce, the monsters under it do..."

"...They do not wish me to tell you this Ms Myskin, but the monsters you fear behind closed doors are not the devils you are dealing with openly..."

"What do you know that your government thinks inappropriate to tell me? This man was my friend, he did not deserve to die this way and damn you Mr Pearce I will be back on the plane to Russia this evening if I find that you are attempting to conceal from me the reasons behind his death."

"Please Ms Myskin, a little calm, Alexy Dastik was not killed for his involvement in these talks, personal demons as opposed to political devils were responsible for his murder."

"What do you mean? Alexy was a good man-"

"Yes, but good men often have their flaws, the tragic hero...You were aware of his gambolling addiction?"

"Yes." She breathed, "I was aware of it, he was a wonderful advisor, but I knew that he struggled behind closed doors the tragic hero indeed...His gambolling was ultimately his downfall?"

"I'm afraid so, in order to clear his gambolling debts he took out a loan of a very different kind..."

She closed her eyes, "Alexy you fool..." she breathed, "What did he become involved in?"

"Drugs...His suppliers became rather more irritated with him than the casinos...He was given a deadline that he failed to meet and so..."

Her eyes narrowed, "I still do not think you are being entirely honest with me Mr Pearce, if Alexy was killed for drugs, why was he killed at these talks, the risks outweigh the rewards..."

"Not so, not when the reward is total anonymity, they expected everyone to do what they are doing, to look the other way, we spend far too much time as human beings looking inside instead of out. They believed that the talks would protect them as no-one would suspect them while the talks shielded them."

"Sneaky bastards..."

"Quite...I am sorry for your loss Ms Myskin, and, in all honesty, shocked to tell you that none of the backstabbing, lying, manipulative son-of a-bitches that you have the delight of sharing in these peace talks had anything to do with his death..."

"Thank you for being honest with me Mr Pearce, I will keep this quiet for the time being, for your sake as much as Alexy's I cannot imagine your superiors would be thrilled with you having told me these sensitive details of their investigation...The talks will continue as planned..."

"Thank you." Harry said, with real respect in his voice, not something that happened often.

He watched as she walked composedly from the room, Ros entered once she had cleared the second corridor, Lucas at her heels,

"She's something isn't she?" she said, quietly, also watching the door Kalina Myskin had passed through,

"Indeed..." she said, thoughtfully before saying airily, "Has Lucas tried to sleep with her yet?"

* * *

Ros, Lucas, Sofia and Ruth took their places in the conference room, sitting around the five corners, all of them feeling considerably more relaxed than they had done the previous few days, now that the threat on the President's life had been severely reduced.

The insider they had identified as Dastik had been vital to the groups plans, and while none of their paranoia allowed them to believe that they had completely neutralised any threat posed to them by Hiroshima, they were content to believe that they had put paid to the better part of their schemes.

The Home Secretary began by offering his condolences to Kalina Myskin. She had been surprised to see Sofia, who had weakly protested that she would be fine and that she had to keep herself busy, something that the reserved Russian Prime Minister had understood and accepted.

The group quickly moved on from the grisly events of the day before and began discussing the terms of the agreement. So far, they had all agreed to limit the construction of nuclear weapons, the complications now came from the suggesting of reducing their existing stockpiles, something that the North Koreans felt especially strongly about.

Half way through a heated argument, Jīnyù got to his feet and stormed from the room, stating that he could no longer negotiate anything with these 'political oafs'. The Russians had gone to have some 'friendly words' with him and the Americans discrete 'smoke signals' contained several things that would have made Ruth blush.

In the end, Jīnyù was returned to his seat, still grumbling, but content to continue and they all agreed that they would be willing to draw up a formal agreement limiting their nuclear weapons, with only a few more minor details to be decided. On this note, they all agreed that it would be best for them to take a break from the intense deliberations that had consumed the morning, have lunch and come back to tackle the minor technicalities that afternoon.

As the group began to file from the cramped, stuffy deliberation room, the team split as ever, Sofia and Ros moving to the front of the groups and ensuring that they were the first ones in the room, Ruth and Lucas coming at the back and being one of the last in the group before the doors closed. It was such a formality that it barely even rated that, it was more of a superstition between the more senior officers who considered it to be necessary meaning that it had developed into a habit since none of them really knew what it was supposed to defend against.

As they filed into the room, Lucas paused; gut instinct was informing him, in no uncertain terms, that something was not right.

Before Dastik's death, MI-5 had insisted that the Home Secretary invent some reason to prevent the talks taking place in the room that they had used for the rest of the week, even after Sofia had successfully dealt with their 'Russian infestation' they had seen no reason not to continue with the change of venue as it would have ruffled even more political feathers than the initial room change.

"Ros." Lucas began, "We're not supposed to be in this room..."

"What?" she asked

He had already slipped through the crowds and was beginning to run in the opposite direction to the stream of people intent on filling their stomachs,

"Where are you going?" Ruth asked, turning around alarmed to find her quarry leaving her at such a speed.

"The roof." Lucas informed them shortly,

"This is no time for your bloody lone ranger antics!" Ros snarled, "If there _is _a sniper up there, unlikely, then how exactly do you expect to defend yourself against him? You're not armed!"

"Oh I'm fairly creative Ros, I'll think of something."

"I'm fairly creative too, and I swear to God if I have to save your neck because you get shot again, said creativity will go in to divining a punishment that will make you wish you were back in Russia!"

"It's times like this I wonder why you didn't became a motivational speaker...Keep everyone away from the windows."

"Right Mystic Meg, before I start causing a panic in a small space you give me something more than your insatiable desire to become an action hero to base this on, we dealt with Dastik-"

"That doesn't mean they won't still try something, Dastik was a formality, he may not have been a necessity, if I was them, I'd still be having a good go at it..."

Lucas rounded the corner and burst out into an external stairwell, the thick concrete circling upwards endlessly and began to climb. By the time he reached the top his shoulder was burning and he was beginning to curse his paranoid antics when he saw the thin metal ladders that would infuriate his already stinging injury.

Gritting his teeth and snarling he began to pull himself up the ladder, gently easing the trapdoor above him open and darting behind a large solar panel. Peering out from behind it he saw a tall black figure carefully setting up a compass on the side of the roof, the gun lying innocently at his feet.

"Ros?" he said, silence, "Ros?" he hissed again, more urgently, "Shit..."

Stepping out softly from behind one of the large, reflective panels he darted to the next one, closer to the sniper, watching as he readied himself. The sniper checked his watch and, began calibrating the gun based on weather conditions.

Lucas pulled out a phone and began hastily texting Ros while he crawled to the other end of the panel to get closer to the sniper. As he did he unbalanced and his injured shoulder caught the corner of the panel, swearing internally and hissing in pain and annoyance as his arm spasmed and the phone leapt from it, he didn't wait to be caught like a rabbit in its den and lunged at the other man as he turned in surprise.

Pinning the other man to the edge of the roof, he made to flip him off the low balcony but howled as a short, wicked dagger was thrust at his chest, narrowly avoiding doing any serious damage by lodging in a rib. It was not a fatal wound but it hurt like Hell and it was more than enough for the other man who had lost his knife but not his wits. He struck Lucas in the throat with the side of his hand causing him to convulse and choke, unable to breathe as blood filled his mouth and stars burst into existence in his eyes.

He could do nothing but fight to remain conscious and breathing as the other man darted back to his perch and took aim with the rifle.

* * *

"Ros!" Lucas' shot and a high pitched squealing noise filled Ros' ear.

"Lucas?" she tried, no answer, "Lucas?" she waited, "Shit."

Putting two and two together and, as ever, reaching disaster she turned to Sofia and Ruth, "I think we may have a problem..."

"What?" They asked, simultaneously,

"I'll be asking Lucas for next week's lottery numbers, in the meantime, keep everyone away from the windows."

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than this became rather difficult as they were plunged into darkness.

Hastily connecting their comms to The Grid Ros barked, "Was that us?"

"What?" Tariq asked,

"Didn't think so...Get Harry and special forces, now."

"What I-"

"Tariq, stop thinking start doing."

"Ros, Sofia?" Ruth breathed, she was crouched down beside the window, "There may be a problem..."

"What?" Ros asked

"I don't think the sniper is their main plan...They can't hope to kill someone with a bullet shot through these windows, they're too thick..."

"Then what the Hell is going on?" Ros spun around, trying to force her brain into gear, "Lucas?"

* * *

Lucas retched again, doubled over in pain, attempting to force air into his lungs. The unmistakeable sound of a silenced gunshot and distant smashing glass forced him to his feet, knowing that it was him next, fight or flight, kill or be killed.

He seized the sniper around the waist and pinned him to the ground. He yelped in fright and fired a second shot into the air.

Lucas wrestled the gun from his hands and pressed it against his throat, massaging his throat, his chest still heaving as he spat blood onto the ground beside them.

To his astonishment the other man began laughing.

"You cannot stop them...Nothing you do will stop his death now, you have been chasing the wrong rabbits..."

Pinning him to the ground with his knee on his chest, restricting his breathing and movement, Lucas examined the rifle, specifically the bullets, staring at them he swore softly, comprehension dawning as the man beneath him laughed insanely.

* * *

The darkness was having the desired effect; anyone who did not know it was coming was now confused and disorientated, although she could not fathom how this helped a would-be-sniper.

The thought had barely formed in her head when the window to their left, the one that Ruth was crouched beneath exploded, shattering in response to a bullet, showering those near it with shards of glass.

"Ruth?" Ros shouted, panicked as confusion reigned, people screaming and hitting the floor,

"Ros! It's a distraction; the sniper is a distraction the assassin's with you Ros. Do you hear me? There are more insiders, they're with you in-"Lucas bellowed in her ear.

"Lucas?" Ros yelled as he was cut off, knowing that he had brought whatever the Hell was happening to him on himself did not help over much but the fact that she could do nothing to help him and everything to help her country forced her to deal with it, "Sofia!" she called, taking charge of the situation.

"He's right...We haven't stopped anything There were three. Three potentials and three insiders, Dastik was one, the other two are in here." She said, having heard what Lucas had said and adding to it hollowly,

At that moment A second gunshot went off, causing even more panic. Sofia and Ros both reacted instinctively, Ros diving for the President while Sofia grabbed the gun from a nearby body guard and used it to first shoot the figure dressed all in black that darted past her causing them to fall to the ground, lifeless and then the thin chain that the chandelier was suspended from; it fell and smashed, spectacularly on the table in the centre, drawing everyone's eyes and drawing everyone's eyes bar Ros' who had lunged for the black silhouette moving towards the President, small handgun clamped in their hand.

Ros hastily thrusting a sharp silver knife she had grabbed from the table under the ribs of their assassin. There was a muffled gunshot a scream and then silence.

"Ros?" It was Harry, "Are you alright?" he barked,

"Yes, we're all fine." She said shortly, breathing hard and praying this was true for Lucas as well, she had not heard anything since his desperate warning.

"The President?" Harry asked, quietly,

Ros did not answer. No-one did.

"Ros, is the President alright?"

"I, I don't know..."

A/N: I have been dreading this chapter almost since the beginning of this, it always felt as though I had just been continually building it up to this point and no matter what I did it was always going to be an anti-climax and a disappointment...Hopefully not, I don't know... Let me know what you thought of this, and thank you everyone who has read and reviewed this faithfully every chapter, your thoughts do mean so much to me :)


	23. War of the Words

**Chapter 23**

War of the Words

As it turned out, apart from having 'a few prawns in his golden hair' as Harry so delicately put it, the American President was absolutely fine, and so Harry grimly informed his team as they settled themselves around the large rectangular table in the meeting room.

"Still not quite sure how I feel about that one..." Ros said, drily, seeing her sentiments reflected in the faces of her colleagues.

"No..." harry replied, darkly, "Particularly considering the fact that our latest intelligence from inside his majesty's suite shows exactly how the American's feel about this latest little 'disaster' in a mercifully private, agreement."

He irritably pressed play on a remote which, by the force its poor buttons were pressed, may well have been personally responsible for the calamity at the Kieran estate, and one of the bugs that had been placed in Crowe's suite alarmingly reported,

"These talks are going to have to be put on the back-burner, our first priority _has _to be getting the President safely back to Washington and figuring out who the bastards that are responsible for this are."

"Officious prick..." Harry muttered, looking nauseated as he turned off the tape, abruptly cutting off the loud noises of agreement coming from the other diplomats in the room, "

"Wonderful, so after everything the bloody idiots are just going to go scampering back to Washington and start pointing fingers in order to make an inordinate scandal of this and see how much oil and how many votes we can extort before the next election when we point fingers at some unsuspecting bugger who had nothing to do with this because it will make us look better but obliterate the peace talks in the meantime, oops, silly us." Ruth fumed, sharing Harry's feelings towards the 'cousins' at this moment in time.

"Unfortunately Ruth, I think the world will miss the fact that the dictionary definition of 'politician' is something along the lines of cowardly, narcissistic, media grabbing, idiotic twats." Harry snarled, through gritted teeth.

"I'm sure you've missed 'pretentious two-faced bastards' from that list..." Ros commented, icily,

"Look, this isn't helping, "Tariq broke in, diplomatically, "Whatever the exact words are in the Politicians Handbook under 'international arsehole' they're sticking to it, and we need to figure out where we go from here."

All in all, they had performed something that, under slightly different circumstances, would have constituted a miracle, by preventing any casualties, none of them felt particularly proud of themselves.

Fortunately, none of them had been seriously injured, either during the attack or in the chaos that ensued. Lucas' knife wound had neither been deep nor wide and had only done what Ros teasingly called, 'vanity damage' to the rib it had struck. Ruth's hands and forearms had been peppered with small cuts from the shower of broken glass that had covered her when the window she had been crouched beneath had shattered. Ros had badly bruised several of her ribs as a result of her rugby tackling one of the assassins from half-way across the room to stop him from killing Russell Crowe, overall they had been extraordinarily lucky but where they would usually have welcomed such injuries, and more, in payment for preventing the assassination of a US President on their soil, the attitude by the American's that had followed had left several of them feeling sour and wishing that they had let them get on with it...

Almost before special forces had arrived at the building to secure their very non-responsive suspects, the American's had been booking flights back to Washington and playing 'rock paper scissors' to decide which country it would be in their best interests to blame for the crisis, in doing so, launching a wrecking ball, as only the American's could, into the tentative peace that had been building over the past few days, and simultaneously proving that they had led common sense than an extremist group that believed nuclear war was the best place for this world to be headed.

"Indeed..." Harry said, shortly, gazing around at his melancholy team, evidently hoping for inspiration to strike him in the form of a neat, quick, simple solution that would appease the government, volunteered by one of them.

Inspiration however, was _not _high on their current priority lists, landing somewhere between 'reading' and visiting the London Eye, behind sleeping, eating, overdosing on coffee and then going back to bed, in that order.

"You know he's asked to meet me, before they leave." Sofia said, quietly, making her first contribution to the conversation.

"Really?" Ros asked, curiously,

"I think there's a slim chance that he _may_ suspect that I am not just an aide for the British government, credit where credit is due, it only took the foiling of an assassination attempt..."

"What are you proposing?" Ros asked,

"That you allow me to go, meet him, tell him the truth, show him the big picture, what his assassination attempt means in the real world-"

"You want to attempt to make a politician see a bigger picture that himself, one in which he is not the sole focus?" Harry scoffed, "I name thee Saint Sofia..."

"Does have a nice ring to it, doesn't it..." she smirked, "Failing that we ground all planes and offer him a cosy retirement home in East London if he doesn't agree to go ahead with these talks..."

"Every politician should be entitled to those happy pension benefits after all of the wonderful work they do...In the meantime; do you genuinely think you can change his mind?"

"If he's as stupid as he looks I can definitely try...Politicians are always out for number one, I'll appeal to that, I'm not lying to him, it's better for everyone involved if he agrees to continue with these talks."

"I don't see any harm in it...She can't exactly make matters worse." Lucas said, huskily. He had been avoiding speaking, something Ros had mercilessly used to her advantage on the way back from the estate.

After the sniper had attempted to knock his throat into the back of his skull, he had been reluctant to strain his voice, but now continued,

"It might stall them if nothing else and I wouldn't put it past her, she can sell religion to the Devil..."

"Just in case she can't, I don't suppose you happen to have proof that Crowe was conveniently a prostitute of some description in his youth?" Ros enquired airily,

He laughed throatily, causing himself to choke before manage to spit out; "Unfortunately not...He's your Snow White..."

"Bullshit." Harry snorted derisively,

"I agree, a politician with no dirty skeletons hanging from the closet is like snow in Hell, it doesn't happen, but to all intents and purposes he's innocent...Whether he's just careful or someone else has been careful for him, we can't touch him...We'll just have to hope he buys the charm Sofia's selling him."

"No pressure then Sofia." Ruth said with a weak smile,

"No, meet him; see what happens...When has he asked for you?" Harry asked,

"Tomorrow at two." She replied quietly,

"Right, good, everyone go home, _sleep, _all of you, including you Ms Myers, I'll see you all tomorrow..."

...

"Ah, Miss Connor isn't it?" the President enquired, as a seedy looking diplomat opened the door to reveal Sofia standing at it.

"Yes sir, it is, Connor, Kate Connor." She said, sweetly, knowing full well that after three days of waiting on him hand and foot, as well as saving his ungrateful life, he knew _exactly _what her name was and that the question was loaded with the intention of making a point.

"Well, please Miss Connor, Kate, come in, take a seat, make yourself comfortable."

She did as he asked, perching on the edge of the couch, her eyes flickering from person to person, taking in their positions basic features and weapons, if any, before returning her attention to the blonde man mountain sitting sipping a cappuccino opposite her, and found that his piercing blue gaze was attempting to read her.

"Why are you here Miss Connor?" he asked, after realising that he could learn nothing from her body language and would have to resort to the verbal variety.

"You asked me to be here Sir." She replied instantly, concealing a smirk with difficulty,

"Indeed...Still, why did you come?"

She considered him for a moment, trying to decide what he was attempting to deduce from this before saying enigmatically, "Frankly Sir, that chandelier cost a fortune, I'll be paying it off for the next fifty years...I wanted to know if it was worth it..."

He chuckled emptily and finished too quickly to enquire, with twinkling eyes, "And?"

"We'll see..." she replied daringly,

He gave her a small fleeting smile in response to this and sat back in his chair, considering her over the rim of his pretentious coffee cup.

"I think we both know that you're a little more than a waitress Kate." He said, suddenly changing the subject.

She had been expecting this and replied, "Indeed Sir, I am an aide for the British government-"

He cut her off with a short bark of laughter before saying, "And what does that mean _exactly_?"

"...I make more money."

He laughed again and she watched him, wondering where this interview was headed, because at the minute she could not decide whether he wanted to her or ship her off to Cuba...

"Why am I here?"

"I thought you'd already answered that..." he replied, genially, his gaze becoming tangibly more calculating for all his causal comments.

"Indeed...I told you why I came; I want to know why I was asked."

"I was testing a theory..." he said, equally vague, with the ghost of a smile,

"You're a fool." She said, quietly, taking charge of the situation tired of his dithering

"What did you say?" he blustered, jumping and sending coffee over his plump hand,

"What you think I said."

"And you're basing this observation on-"he began before being interrupted by one of his apoplectic, self-important advisors,

"M'am, do you understand who you are speaking to?" he demanded, looking at Sofia as though she were three years old and had enquired whether the fat man was Santa Claus, "This is one of the most influential men in the world and you have to nerve to call him a fool?" he demanded, shocked,

"Makes you wonder what I have the nerve to call you then doesn't it?" she smirked at the insufferable politician.

The President stifled a chuckle as his advisors bristled before saying, "Let her be...Why don't you take a walk Charlie? I'm sure she'll have thought of a decent adjective for you by the time you get back...All of you, go on now, go."

"Mr. President, I don't think I-"the greasy Charlie began before being interrupted by a gleeful Sofia,

"Come now Charlie, don't you know who this is? One of the most influential men on this planet, just have you an order...Jump to it..." she smirked,

The disgruntled diplomats made their way from the room, leaving Sofia alone with Crowe.

"I like you." The President told her, surveying her over the tips of his pudgy fingers, "You've got balls, which is more than I can honestly say about half of them, and spirit if nothing else...And I'd wager that there's a lot more 'nothing' to you than meets the eye Kate."

Never one to take compliments well she retorted immediately with, "I'd wager there's a lot more 'nothing' to this meeting than meets the eye too..."

"Well, I almost died today, changes one's perspective, makes you do all sorts of weird and wonderful things."

"Bullshit." She said, flatly, startling him again, "You're exactly the same today as you were yesterday, if we all changed every time we almost died I'd spend ninety five per cent of my life having an out of body experience trying to gain 'perspective'. Many things happen in our lives that alter our views and change the way we think...Things that 'almost' happen don't change anything."

"A very noble sentiment...But I fail to see the point of it."

"If that's true I fail to see how you got elected." She said curtly, never giving him room time to breathe between remarks.

"Jesus Sofia, easy..." Lucas hissed, while Ros smirked gleefully, Sofia had not been wired and so she could not hear their reactions to her words but the bugs in the suite allowed them to listen in.

"You _do _need to remember who you are talking to Miss Connor; there is only so much disrespect I will tolerate."

"I am not disrespecting you Mr Crowe, and I know exactly who I'm talking to, a human being, flesh and blood stuck to a skeleton with a brain bobbing about somewhere in your head, exactly the same as every other human being on this planet do you give me one good reason why I should speak to you with any more reverence or respect as any other stranger. As far as I can tell you're exactly the same as them, narcissistic, self-important, with public morals you wouldn't compromise for all of the riches of the Gods and private ones that crumble away if someone breathes upon them too heavily. If you want respect, if you want to be remembered then you have to _do _something. History does not recognise people who _almost _do things of note; you won't be remembered as the President that almost saved the peace talks that nearly changed everything, you'll be remembered as the president who got a bit of a fright and slunk back home with his tail between his legs and attempted to save his political and personal dignity by telling the world that someone tried to kill you. And you know what? The funny thing is that the nameless, faceless human being that no-one knows and wouldn't know how to demand respect even if people did know who he was, he _will _be remembered; he will be remembered not for _almost _killing the President, but for manipulating eight of the most powerful and stubborn bastards I've ever met into complying with his insane belief because he did something, he did something that no-one expected, he attempted the impossible before he died, and while he may not have succeeded in killing you, he'll have succeeded in his main goal. I'm glad...I'm glad that history will remember him for what he did, when you did nothing. Dying, that would have been something more than this and that would have changed everything, one way or other, almost dying? _You _change nothing..." she trailed off then, her brain catching up with her mouth as she realised that her words may have overstayed their welcome.

Every word of what she had said had been true and she had meant every word. She had come here fully intending to change his mind and make him sign the treaty they had all but made the day before. She had a feeling however that she could probably have put it with a little more diplomacy and eloquence than telling him he was a brain-dead poster-boy who would be remembered for nothing more than being a cowardly, narcissistic twat. However political delicacy had never been one of her strong points, if eight years in Russia had not dulled her sharp tongue, she doubted tea with the President would...

"I don't think I've ever been spoken to that way by a waitress before..." he said, still looking slightly shell-shocked after her verbal bombardment.

She doubted that he had been spoken to in that way by the _Queen of Sheba_, however, ignoring the slight misnomer and countered lightly with,

"I don't think I've ever spoken to the American President like that before...A first for us both."

"Indeed...You say that these people, these terrorists, whoever they are they're attempting to change our hearts and minds and succeed or not, we do not negotiate with them, and we do not bow down to their demands. If what these people want is to make a spectacle of my death then that is something we must avoid at all costs..."

She laughed at the bitter irony of this, _self-important bastard..._She thought, though thankfully managed to avoid her mouth sharing her mind's sentiment.

"Though this may shock you to hear, these particular 'terrorists' did not come into this with their eyes closed wondering how many hits on YouTube your death will get them, difficult as it may be for you to understand, your death is not their primary aim and, as it turns out, is not even necessary for them to be successful."

"Well, what _do _they want?" he asked, bristling, his over-inflated ego preventing him from seeing past the world's eternal horror and sadness at his death.

"This." She said with an incredulous laugh, "Their aim is to start a nuclear war between the major powers sooner rather than later-"

"But that's insane!" he blustered,

"Quite, but you are actively allowing this to happen, you're not negotiating with terrorists, you're complying with their wishes."

"I would never-"

"If you 'would never' start nuclear war then you should bloody well be pushing for the only thing that can be put in place to stop it and that means completing these peace talks with a successful agreement."

"Well, yes." He blustered, "But I must think whether it should be my first choice, I mean, it's not as simple as that or it would have been signed months ago, I must consider other things about this situation, the world expects me to-"

"Yes it expects you to hide behind the skirts of the CIA in Washington, and what happens when the world expects answers? When your loyal voting subjects want to know why their beloved President was almost funned down? What are you going to tell them I wonder? The truth. That the man who came the closest to killing you was a married man with three children, an American man from California, born and raised in a little town outside Sacramento? Or will you tell them the glorified version known to you as 'necessary' known to the rest of the world as lies and start pointing the finger of blame at another nation? I know what my money's on...And where do you think that will eventually lead? Even if you all come to your senses that you can't play God with people's lives for the sake of appearances, do you think the world will ever come within a thousand miles of this chance for peace again? The ball's in your court, if you say we go ahead then we go ahead, the other nations can't back out now, not if you say yes, can't you see? You do what the world expects and that world will not last long. You do what no-one expects? And this world and the next will remember you, and respect you because you deserve it, because you _did _something."

"That's really what these people are expecting?" he breathed, latching on to the idea of nuclear war and not listening to much else beyond that.

"Yes and it damn near might. If you had died there would have been no off-switch. You need to make a decision, or this will make the Cuban Missile Crisis will look like the Teddy Bear's picnic."

She stood and walked to the door, he stopped her before she left however saying,

"You're security services aren't you? MI-5? And you're name's not really Kate, is it?"

She said nothing but smiled to herself as she placed a hand on the door handle, the ghost of a smile dancing across her lips before saying,

"No...It's short for Catherine."

A/N: I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed writing Sofia and Crowe's verbal sparring, it may not have been the most exciting way but I always felt Spooks was best when it focussed on two people talking things out as opposed to the crazy explosions, anyway, I'd like to hear your thoughts on this as always :)


	24. All's Well That

**Chapter 24**

All's Well That...

"In a surprising move towards international unity and co-operative peace, the American President, Robert Crowe, who has been in London for four days now along with representatives from eight of the world's leading political figures, has given the surprise announcement today that he will push on with the peace talks despite the shocking attempt on his life yesterday afternoon. Representatives of the well liked American politician have released a statement today claiming that Mr Crowe in no-way wants the unfortunate actions of 'a lone, highly disturbed individual' to threaten the peace they have been working towards during these tal-"

Harry tiredly jabbed at the power button on the remote and the irritatingly perky blonde news reporter was cut off in full flow of how wonderful Robert Crowe was and what a fantastically selfless human being he was.

"Selling religion to the Devil indeed..." he murmured, glancing around at his exhausted team.

For all of his orders about sleeping the day before, none of them had found themselves slipping in to particularly easily, they had been too full of adrenaline and caffeine and their body clocks had been convinced that they would never sleep again had been set to keep them awake constantly. Add onto that the pressures and possibilities that came with Sofia's later talk with Crowe, and they had found the plague of insomnia running rampant through Section D.

As a result the biggest reaction they could muster was annoyance at the shiny faced reporter and how she dared to look so awake at this time in the morning.

"So, until the next tragedy then..." Ros said, blearily, feeling like most of them, at a slight loss as to what they should do now.

"It's looming around the corner, you realise we have to do the reports on this?" Harry said, coating Ros' barbed comments with his usual sunny, uplifting veil of cheery optimism.

Not even the threat of a dirty bomb could have cleared the room as quickly as Harry's mention of every MI-5 officers greatest terror, paperwork. Harry watched with amusement as most of his team headed for the hills citing everything from doctor's appointments to hungry cats, leaving behind a very disgruntled Ros.

"If I get to Hell and find that you're not in it I will be exceptionally pissed." She told him bluntly,

He chuckled and replied, holding the door open for her, "Welcome to Hell..."

Ros began typing up her report, declining Harry's offer both of Scotch and valium, the keys as though every one had offered her personal insult, her stubborn compulsion to avoid leaving things unfinished preventing her from leaving until she had finished the damn thing.

She watched from the corner of her eyes as Ruth hovered outside Harry's office and was torn between shouting at her and telling her to stop bloody dithering and just do whatever it was she was deliberating over, thinking venomously that if Sophie's Choice had featured Ruth, half of the cinema audience would have killed themselves to escape the criminal indecisiveness that plagued that woman, and starting a betting pool among the junior officers to see how long she would stand there before something gave.

Ruth glanced towards Ros and flushed, sensing from her expression the thoughts that were running through her head and turned back to Harry. He was at the step that came immediately before throwing things and banging his head off the walls on the Head of Section D's list of mental breakdowns, nursing a crystal glass and musingly swirling the dregs of the whiskey left at the bottom with an expression that implied he was contemplating attempting to drown himself in their murky depths.

As sparks began flying from Ros' eyes and she began acutely aware that she had been standing in the one spot for so long she was beginning to sink into the floor, she hastily tapped at the door and slid it open with its characteristic hiss.

"How's the Scotch?" she said, stumbling and drawing her a questioning look from him,

"Try it yourself." He said, with a small smile, reaching into the drawer of the desk and withdrawing a second glass, pouring a splash into it, hesitating for a second, wondering how much more his liver could take before it went on strike, deciding he had bloody well earned it and refilling his own glass at the same time.

"That's not what I, I didn't mean Scotch, I wanted you, I wanted to say you, how are you." She said, flustered, before flushing darkly and draining the Scotch in one to cover as he smiled sympathetically.

"I'm fine." He said,

"As is the Scotch." She choked, gagging on the strong spirit, "And you were doing a wonderful impression of not being 'fine' from where I was standing...You'll turn into Ros if you're not careful." She said, shrugging in a defiant 'what the Hell' manner as he offered to top up her glass.

"It's nothing Ruth, really." He said, reassuringly watching as she sipped more delicately at the Scotch now, wincing at the sharp taste, "Where is everyone?"

"Running for cover from the bombardment of paperwork." She said with a small smile, "Tariq's meeting his girlfriend and 'getting laid and hammered' in his own poetic terms, Ros is graciously abandoning the reports and heading home, Lucas has gone to an appointment with physio since your threat of paperwork put the fear of God in him and I have absolutely no idea where Sofia is, except to say that I'm fairly sure she's not here..."

"But you are..." he said, quietly, sipping at his drink,

"Well yes...So are you."

"Indeed..." they both gulped hastily at their drinks, avoiding the others' gaze as the pods outside announced Ros' resignation of defeat to the mighty opponent of stacks of papers.

"Do you think they'll manage to make something of these peace talks?"

"I don't know..." Harry sighed, "I've found with these talks that they often create the monsters they're trying to prevent..."

"Indeed...When one door closes another one opens and all that..." she said quietly, staring into the depths of her glass,

"Quite...Chop off one of their heads this evening, another two will have grown back by morning..."

"We'll be back in the morning too though..." she whispered quietly, placing a hand on his.

"Yes, you will..." he said, draining his glass and standing, she mirrored him, "I'll see you in the morning Ruth..." he said quietly,

"Well...We haven't finished this evening yet..." she said, quietly, the alcohol loosening her tongue as he watched her carefully,

"Very true..."

* * *

Sofia collapsed on the cold wooden floor of her apartment, sliding against the breakfast bar, exhausted by the last few days. She had not slept or eaten properly in what felt like months and was drained, physically and emotionally from pretending that she was fine.

She had spent the majority of her time on this operation suppressing every one of her natural instincts, simple things such as colleagues brushing past her took an inordinate amount of effort to deal with, pretending that she had not noticed when her stomach had convulsed, twisting itself into tight knots and forcing an acrid substance into her throat.

She closed her eyes and allowed the floodgates to come down and all the horrors of the last week or so to assault her conscience, the onslaught of memories consuming her entirely. There was no-one here that she had to pretend to be alright for, no-one to watch her, no-one to judge her, no-one to think that she was weak, no-one to witness as she fell apart completely, slumped against the cold stone at her back causing her skin to prickle uncomfortably as the tears that she had refused to shed in front of them fell thick and fast into her lap.

She screamed in pain and frustration and found herself on her feet without ever having given it permission to do so and lashed out at nothing in particular, her hand colliding with some of the delicate plant pots arranged along the window ledge.

After her return from Russia she had lost herself in two things, books and gardening, while they seemed odd choices at first, they made sense to her, her voracious appetite for books had allowed her to function again on an intellectual level, and having something that relied on her for its survival gave her a reason to live. As it was, every Christmas and birthday, Lucas send her some strange exotic seed, all of which were now lying in a confused tangle of broken clay and spilt earth.

She placed her shaking, bleeding hands over her mouth in horror as she saw the ruined remains of the world she had become so immersed in in these last three years, the only thing reminding her that she was alive was now reminding her how broken she was...

Her fingers trembled over Lucas' number on her address book, knowing that she needed help, however much she was loathe to accept it. The phone barely began to ring however when she threw it across the room, causing it to explode against the wall as she curled up in a heap, hugging her knees to her chest as she fell apart...

* * *

"We can never know what another human being is thinking. We can make educated guesses based on body language what and how they say things but we can never _know_.

This is one of the greatest attractions between members of the human race. It draws us to others, mystery and intrigue, the desire for knowledge. Knowledge about one, completely unique individual. We want to know that person.

Intimacy is not just about physical or even emotional closeness. It is about psychological closeness. We want to be inside that person's head, more than we want to be inside their bed. We want them to give us 'access all areas' passes to their minds to allow us to explore every inch of them. We want them to want to tell us everything. We in turn, want to be able to judge them fully and completely, not based on what they willingly reveal to everyone else based on their deepest darkest fears and flaws, all of the things that they are less sure of the insecurities that plague them every day but that they feel they cannot share with anyone else, these we must peel away as we grow closer to reveal the truth below and so, to reveal them.

The eyes are known as the windows to the soul and while this may seem very romantic and poetic and while it may even be true, it is still not particularly helpful.

Our soul or our spirit is just that, it is our essence, a canvas on which we add colour but it is not the colour itself, it is not us, it is not who we are.

Who we are is never fixed, ever changing, altered and defined by our experiences and what we choose to do with them. Who we are is what we know, why we hate and love, what we will fight for and what we will die for how and who we respond to every day. The things that we will only ever experience once whether we wish them to repeat everyday or we wouldn't wish them on our worst enemy. All of these things, and more, make up who we are, _that _is what makes us unique for no-one can ever have the same experiences as us, and even if they did, they would never react to them in the same way.

This depth and ever-changing complexity cannot be contained within something that is so easily accessible, surely.

If the eyes are the windows to the soul then the soul cannot be who we are. You could never board a train, look at the man sitting opposite you, look into his eyes, into his very sold and then claim to know who he was.

If we could we would all live in a much safer world. We would know when our partner was going to beat on us without ever even going to dinner with them. We would know when we were being lied to, we would never be hurt or manipulated again. We would be able to tell when the man seated at the table, eating and drinking with us, intends to slit our throats to prevent the evolution of something he does not believe in...

What a dull world we would live in. Of course, none of the things that we consider to be evil would be allowed to happen, no-one would rape or murder, and no-one would go to war...But would that then be a world that we wanted to live in? There would be no nothing. The only reason we can have peace is because we know we are not at war. The only reason we do not constantly live in agony is because we know what agony feels like in the first place. We can only be happy if we are not sad, we can only love if we know how to hate, can only live if we know we must die...As human beings, whom, by their very nature, crave knowledge and intrigue, we would be deadened by the fact that nothing interesting would ever happen. If everyone knew everyone else, then we would all do our best to forget, for then, and only then, we would be in a world where we wanted to live...

The exception to this rule is, of course, when some idiotic bastard decides to place himself in the middle of some vital world-saving summit, then I would very much like to be able to look into his eyes and feel instantaneously justified in putting a bullet between them..."

"Elegantly put as ever..." he said with a small smile, watching as she drifted towards him,

"The truth hurts sometimes." She said, settling herself beside him and gently slipping her hand into his. "Coming?" she asked with a small smile,

He smirked softly and brushed his lips against hers in response as they slipped into the bedroom, gently closing the door behind them.

* * *

A/N: The ending of this strory sort of crept up on me without me noticing so I hope this was OK as a way to finish it. I'll say a HUGE thank-you to all of my faithful reviewers who've managed to stick with me and all of my crazy ramblings :) I would love it if you could spare the time to drop me a few lines and let me know what you thought of this chapter and the story as a whole. I have an idea in progress for another story which should be up soon following on from this one so if you enjoyed it keep an eye out, as always thanks for reading and reviewing.


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